WHY THE CHINESE SHOULD BE ADMITTED.

"THE period of exclusiveness is past," said the late President McKinley in his last speech in Buffalo. He was speaking of the policy of reciprocity of finding markets abroad for our surplus products by treaty stipulation for reduction of tariffs with nations that want what we have to sell; thus developing in turn larger fields of production to supply them, and affording more employment to labor, while not disturbing our settled policy of protection at home. This is sound statesmanship, but it involves the expenditure of more labor in the development of these fields of supply. A liberal policy in trade does not harmonize very well with the "sand-lot" statesmanship of fifty years ago.

Men are more important than things. We pay tithes of mint, anise, and cumin in sordid trade, and omit the weightier matter of brotherly love. Nations have a right, of course, to exclude undesirable immigrants, but the exclusion should not discriminate unfairly. Wu Ting Fang is right. The exclusion of his countrymen is arbitrary and unjust. It is a law for nations as well as for the members of society that they should intermingle for the advancement of civilization. The idea is well expressed in the Burlingame Treaty of July 28, 1868:

The United States of America and the Emperor of China cordially recognize the inherent and inalienable right of man to change his home and allegiance, and also the mutual advantage of the free migration and emigration of their citizens and subjects respectively from the one country to the other for purposes of curiosity, of trade, or as permanent residents.

Secretary Hay, in his eloquent speech at the Chamber of Commerce banquet in New York not long ago, associated our foreign policy and diplomacy with the Golden Rule, as dear to Confucianism as to our Christian system, and yet we refuse to reciprocate a common courtesy in the case of a people which has shown every disposition to cultivate the kindliest relations with us.

Isolation is a violation of duty in the case of nations as well as in the case of members of society. Individuals may be compelled by law to perform their social duties in the state, but in the absence of treaties nations are left to the widest discretion. The United States has always been

liberal to the point of danger, with respect not only to the entrance of immigrants, but also to their naturalization, their admission to the suffrage, and their eligibility to the honors of the Republic. The tragic event in Buffalo last September has called a halt. Anarchists have crept in with their propaganda of assassination, which emphasizes the necessity of greater strictness. Hereafter the lines will be more closely drawn. But the reasons for the exclusion of the Chinese must be other than those that apply to anarchists and the criminal classes. The Chinaman can never be an anarchist or a revolutionist. He is by nature conservative, quiet, docile, and well-behaved. A careful examination of the criminal and police records of any city in the United States will show a smaller percentage of disorder among Chinese residents than among residents of any other foreign nationality. A people educated under the influence of Confucius can never go far wrong in their morals. He taught the same morality as the Sermon on the Mount five hundred years before Christ was born. The Chinese are superstitious, it is true; but their superstition illustrates the best qualities of head and heart-love of home and reverence for ancestors.

The Yellow Peril is a spectre of the imagination, created of "such stuff as dreams are made of." Under the liberal terms of the Treaty of 1868 millions might have come to our shores, but they did not. Attracted by the gold fields in California, a few thousands came over, and nobody thought anything of it. In 1851 there were about 70,000 Chinese on the Pacific Coast. Chinese emigration was always limited to a few districts in the province of Canton.

When the era of railroad construction came on, farms were opened up, and new fields of labor invited immigrants, the required labor did not come fast enough to satisfy American greed, and more Chinese were sent for. There was thus introduced the obnoxious coolie system, which was prohibited under severe penalties by the Act of March 3, 1875. The hard times of the '70's intervened, leading to reaction and agitation. The result was the modification of the Burlingame Treaty by the amendatory Treaty of November 17, 1880, by which Chinese laborers might be excluded absolutely as the United States should see fit. Then came the stringent law of 1888, known as the Geary Act, which expires in May next, and which it is proposed to extend.

The arguments used in support of exclusion are: (1) that the Chinese are not assimilable; and (2) that they drag our workers down to the level of cheaper labor and lower living. As Josh Billings would say, these advocates of exclusion "know more things that hain't so" than

would fill a good-sized library. Both philosophy and history rise up to contradict them. What is meant by assimilation? It is not intermarriage, or amalgamation; it is only imitation; and there are no keener imitators than the Mongolian races. This is the secret of the marvellous revolution in Japan. Assimilation has been compared to the process of throwing grain into a hopper and grinding it out in a new form. No more remarkable process has ever been known in any age or among any people.

Foreigners are naturally gregaribus. Whether their residence is to be temporary or permanent they preserve their national traits, and no harm has ever come from.it. Unity of industrial fabric, with diversity of fibre, is the best guarantee of national strength. Admit the Chinese laborer as well as the merchant and student, give them citizenship and qualified suffrage, open the schools to their children and assimilation will be rapid and complete.

life

Not homogeneity but heterogeneity has been the law of our national The German converts the Puritan Sabbath into a national holiday he drinks his beer and enjoys his music. But there is no better citizen. The same would be true of the Chinaman, although he has his society, burns his joss light, and worships, his ancestral tablet. Two hundred years ago the Jews were mobbed in England. To-day a Jew dominates the finances of the Empire, and Jews sit in Parliament. The last vestige of anti-Semitic feeling has disappeared from the world except in France, Spain, and Russia. The Jews are among our best and most useful citizens, thoroughly assimilated with our civilization.

In an age when commerce was piracy the negro was seized in his native jungles in Africa, carried to all parts of the world, and made the slave of the white man. Slavery cannot be defended on principle; but it must be admitted that through its avenue the negro race, by contact with the whites, has been lifted to a plane of civilization it never could have reached otherwise. The negro is the natural laborer of the South, just as the Chinaman is the natural laborer of the Far East. J Deportation of the one is neither practicable nor desirable, and exclusion of the other is a piece of the same folly The Indian has been transformed by the same process from a savage in his tepee to a farmer on his allotment, and his children are at school. Yet the Indian is on the road to extinction. He has run against the sharp point of destiny. Removed from the corral of the reservation, deprived of government rations, and thrown on his own resources, he can never survive the sharp conflict with the superior race or escape its consuming vices.

When two races, the one inferior and the other superior, come in

contact in large numbers, the inferior either is lifted up to the plane of the superior or is exterminated. History does not show a case where the superior race has been dragged down to the level of the inferior. Before the War of the Rebellion the advocates of slavery always contended that emancipation would result in a war of races and the expulsion or extinction of one or the other. Such is the weakness of human judgment! What an explosion of false theories and what a decay of prejudices has this generation witnessed! The slave is free, but the South is producing ten bales of cotton where she raised one before, and is manufacturing it besides. In every other line of industry she is sharing the magnificent prosperity of the present day. The same predictions were made as are now made about the Yellow Peril the ruin of the country by the degradation of the white race coming in contact with the black.

The concentration of any people in the same way as that of the Chinese in San Francisco is, of course, productive of vice. They have their opium joints and all other forms of evil known to the human race; so have we our whiskey joints and all other forms of vice and crime in certain districts of New York. To take our eyes from these "sore spots and locate them exclusively on Chinatown is nothing but another instance of the traditional mote and beam.

The wonderful transformation of Japan in less than half a century is the most instructive of all instances of assimilation. In that country Western ideas have been grafted on the decaying stalk of a decadent civilization. The Japanese are the Anglo-Saxons of the Mongolian racea race that invented gunpowder and the art of printing, and needed only a rejuvenation of its latent genius. This Japan has accomplished. By a magic development of her resources, she has covered her land with the smoke-stack of the factory and the railroad, and has built for herself an army and a navy that make her take rank with first-class powers.

Commodore Perry, standing with an open Bible on the capstan of his flagship in Tokio in 1854, is a more important character than Commodore Dewey on the bridge of the Olympia in Manila Bay in 1898. The Philippines would be a burden except as a point d'appui for the new civilization in the Orient. It is four hundred years since St. Xavier first set foot on Chinese soil as a missionary. In the intervening centuries other soldiers of the Cross have followed to carry out the Divine injunction to spread the Gospel, and yet we now say that their converts are not fit to be received within our gates. Is not this a mockery and a travesty?

The objection that the Chinese work more cheaply than other foreigners or Americans in the same lines of industry is not sustained by the evidence. Like all other laborers they seek the highest wages going, and they soon learn what these are. Chinamen have a keen eye for the main chance. That they live more cheaply and save more money than our laborers is true, but this is a virtue that deserves imitation rather than condemnation. There is really no competition between the Chinese and our people; and if they do work for less wages, no harm can come of it, because they occupy different spheres of industry. As cooks, house servants, and coal miners, they only come in conflict with Poles, Hungarians, Italians, Scandinavians, and the negroes; and if only to solve the "servant problem" the abandonment of the policy of exclusion would be justified.

But there is a view of this subject which transcends all others in importance. Our new President evidently sees that a mistake has been made in the Philippines. He says in his able message:

In our anxiety for the welfare and progress of the Philippines, it may be that here and there we have gone too rapidly in giving them local self-government. It is on this side that our error, if any, has been committed. No competent observer, sincerely desirous of finding out the facts and influenced only by a desire for the welfare of the natives, can assert that we have not gone far enough. We have gone to the very verge of safety in hastening the process. To have taken a single step further or faster in advance would have been folly and weakness and might well have been crime.

And again:

Of

The time has come when there should be additional legislation for the Philippines. Nothing better can be done for the Islands than to introduce industrial enterprises. Nothing would benefit them so much as throwing them open to industrial development. The connection between idleness and mischief is proverbial, and the opportunity to do remunerative work is one of the surest preventives of war. course, no business man will go into the Philippines unless it is to his interest to do so; and it is immensely to the interest of the Islands that he should go in. It is therefore necessary that the Congress should pass laws by which the resources of the Islands can be developed; so that franchises (for limited terms of years) can be granted to companies doing business in them, and every encouragement be given to the incoming of business men of every kind.

The President is right. The politicians must give way to the captains of industry. The Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights are examples of "a species of baggage we never should have attempted to carry into our tropical possessions." England, the wisest colonizing power that has ever existed, did not carry Magna Charta or the Petition of Right into India; but she sent thither her capitalists, her