1

the examination of the past fifty years and by which the men of this generation must be guided if they would not repeat its experiments, errors and injustice. Nothing is clearer than that all the evils of Chinese immigration, both real and prospective, have been greatly exaggerated; now that it is all but past it appears that the Chinese who would not or could not assimilate have gone home or are dying out in this country without descendants, leaving only the memory of their industry, their patience, their picturesque attire, and the labor without which California would have been infinitely less rich and comfortable than it is. The few hundreds who have tried to assimilate with us are living peaceably and usefully with their families, bringing up their children in American fashion with American ideas and contributing as stable and useful a factor as any foreign element in California to its cosmopolitan population.

"In the light of this result there seems to be no reason whatever to debar the Chinaman any longer from naturalization when he shall have fulfilled the new law which requires five years continuous residence, a declaration of intention two years in advance, ability to speak the English language, and a renunciation of allegiance to his native country.

"It has been for many years the unanimous opinion of those who have made a study of the Chinese in this country that if they had been naturalized even in small numbers it would have caused their rights to be respected and would have protected them from many of the outrages which they have suffered. It is not to be expected that the illiterate European foreigner, conscious of his own value as a potential citizen and intoxicated with the apparent license of an easy-going democracy, should respect the yellow man whom he cannot understand, of whose economic competition he is afraid, and whom the native American has considered unworthy of naturalization. The denial of naturalization can no longer be justified by the excuse that the Chinese are inferior either intellectually or industrially; or that they are anarchistic and incapable of citizenship; or that they are vicious, unstable and immoral. Fifty years of experience with them here and the disclosure of their national characteristics at home has shown that they are quite as desirable, tested by the ordinary tests of immigration, as many that we have already received and assimilated, and perhaps even more so than many that are now coming into the country.

"One of the most astonishing things in connection with the ex

1 Our italics.

clusion of the Chinese is the fact that the general immigration laws shutting out undesirable aliens-diseased, paupers, insane, criminal and the like-were not applied to the Chinese until 1903. They were constantly charged with all these defects, but the California statesmen who secured the exclusion laws never asked that the general exclusion law be applied to them. The records of prisons, asylums, hospitals and almshouses after fifty years show why; if those laws alone had been applied to the Chinese there would have been very few shut out-too few to suit the advocates of no-competition with American-European labor.

"It may as well be confessed that the sole basis of the present exclusion of Chinese laborers from the United States is their virtues, not their vices, either positive or negative. They can assimilate and have assimilated in small numbers under most adverse conditions, along with many Europeans; they can and do raise their standard of wages and of living to those of many European immigrants; they have a less proportion of paupers, insane, criminal and diseased persons in proportion to their numbers than most of the foreign-born in this country. They are, in fact, industrious, thrifty, shrewd, conservative, and healthily selfish-like many Europeans.

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They were excluded because they were a menace to American labor-by which is meant a menace to the policy of monopoly of labor which is the present ideal of the American trade unionist. Yet it may be doubted whether Chinese labor is any greater menace to the growth of free, self-respecting, rationally organized labor than the less desirable of those European thousands whose low standard of living, wages and intelligence now threaten it; for these comparatively unintelligent and underfed additions to the body of labor must continually be educated, absorbed and uplifted by the partially Americanized laborers already in the field.

"The Chinese, on the contrary, are already thoroughly organized, trained in the essential principles of trade unionisin and the benefit society; and they afford an extraordinary opportunity for trade unionism to strengthen itself in California if race prejudice did not prevent.

"From the Chinese standpoint, nothing has been more illogical and unwarrantable in the treatment of the Chinese in the United States than the denial of our treaty obligation to protect them. The hiatus between State and Federal control in our national constitution which permits the Federal Government to refuse protection to

foreigners on the ground that it cannot interfere with a state; and which allows any locality to practice race discrimination and its criminal classes to perpetrate injuries,-protected by local sympathy from interference by state authorities and leaving no means of redress except through local courts permeated by the same sympathies -is an inexplicable weakness in the mind of a Chinaman. China may be slow to coerce or to interfere with local authorities, but she has never denied the obligation nor refused to pay ample indemnity for injuries upon Americans in China. The more aggressive nations whose emigrants have received injuries in this country have shown an intention to demand the fulfilment of such treaty obligations. President Harrison expressed the opinion that it was not only possible but desirable for Congress to make offenses against the treaty rights of foreigners domiciled in the United States cognizable in the Federal courts. Recent outrages and discriminations in the case of the Japanese have again brought the question into prominence and foreign nations, including China, will be likely in the future to demand a fulfilment of such treaty promises.

"But the history of Chinese immigration to the United States, however interpreted, constantly returns to two considerations: the violation of treaty stipulations by legislation; and the extension of legislation by official regulation. Both together have resulted in the loss not only of our prestige in China but of the good feeling long standing between the two nations.

"The imperative reforms demanded in the light of the history of our treatment of Chinese immigrants is that the law should strictly conform to treaty phraseology and intent; and that the regulations necessary to enforce that law should as strictly conform to the reasonable interpretation of both treaties and legislation. To this end the immigration service must be purged of officers imbued with the anti-Chinese traditions of past administrations, from dishonest and incompetent employees; and from the overweening influence of organized labor, whose nominees cannot or do not carry out the law for the interest of the country, nor with equal justice to the Chinese, but solely in the interest of their class. Although the Chinese exclusion law was made at the demand and by the representatives of organized labor chiefly, it does not solely concern them; the propagandists of trade, religion and international friendship have an equal right to be heard. The law should therefore be a reasonable compromise to meet the demands of all the classes concerned.

The

"After all, the exclusion of Chinese labor, acquiesced in by many who have not approved the method, is not the immediate and vital question. It is rather, whether a bureau of officials and the consular service shall continue to jeopardize the relations of two nations by methods of administration unwarranted either by treaties or legislation or even by the selfish interests of the country. In short, whether the non-laboring Chinese shall not be treated with such courtesy as befits the people of a most favored nation. remedy for present conditions necessarily involves special and highly trained officers of the service stationed in China; the devising of a passport which upon identification shall be final, not mere prima facie evidence of the Chinaman's right to enter this country; and such that when here he shall be free from molestation. It involves also a new registration of all the resident Chinese and a non-partisan board of inquiry or an immigration court, to which all debarred Chinese may appeal.

"Some of these obviously imperative reforms are already bruited but they will be purely superficial in their effect unless a strict conformity of laws and regulations with the treaty is secured; for without this formal legislative expression of our intention as a nation to fulfill our obligations, the friendship with China cannot be restored nor her coöperation be obtained; and without her coöperation no immigration service established in China on the part of the United States can attain satisfactory results."

X

FRIENDLY TREATMENT BY A POWERFUL WESTERN NATION OF A POWERFUL EASTERN PEOPLE: THE UNITED STATES AND JAPAN

T

ENSION exists to-day between Japan and America. Papers in both countries frequently assert in startling head-lines that war is certain. Multitudes in both lands accept these statements without question, and are developing mutual suspicion, distrust and animosity. Many false stories are widely circulated in each land about the other which are readily believed.

What now should American churches do to establish right relations, overcome this growing animosity, remove this tension, and stop the frequent war scares? This is a matter of importance. It involves, however, delicate questions and farreaching considerations.

When Japan first came in contact with the white man (1553), she welcomed him. For sixty years she gave him full opportunity. Several hundred thousand Japanese became Christian. But when Japan learned of the white man's aggressions and ambitions, she concluded that the white man meant a White Peril, to avoid which she turned him out, exterminated Christianity and for 250 years carried out her policy of exclusion.

By that policy, however, she lost the stimulus of international life and fell behind. In 1853, when Commodore Perry knocked at her doors, she discovered how belated and helpless she was, due to her policy of exclusion. She wavered for a decade, suffered revolution due to conflicting conceptions as to the right way in which to meet the white man, and finally, late in the sixties, adopted the policy of learning the