THE TOWN OF BLUE VALLEY
do believe, however, that his imagination was much more fired by these tales of the Ocean-men than that of the average Chinese lad, and, that to him, even the manual labor of his child environment took on something of the uplift that eventually made him the Founder of the Chinese Republic. For he early realized that there was something beyond the glaze of the green or red-tile roof; something more beautiful than ebony carvings or brilliant hanging scrolls or quaintly paneled lattices. However, Sun tells me that his first real information concerning the land of the Oceanmen came from a returned emigrant.
As regards these Chinese emigrants, returned from the gold-fields of America, it is known that the only demand for Chinese labor in America that we have ever allowed to be supplied was in the early days of California gold-fields. Then the demand was keen. Gold claims were staked out, men watching their precious holdings with guns in their hands to protect them; but there was no labor to be had for the panning out of the gold. A fabulous offer of wage failed to obtain laborers, so great was the distance from the large centers of American population to the new virgin land of gold. The American laborer, or white foreign laborer, of to-day became a gold-claim owner on the morrow. Sufficient immediate labor could not
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