ADDRESS OF REV. WILLIAM ALVIN BARTLETT, D.D.
After remarking that the Chinese question was little in some aspects, as when fifty million people frantically rise to defend themselves against a paltry handful of 75,000 Chinamen, Dr. Bartlett continues: But there is a sense in which it is large. It is a large question to any man. We find, according to the best accounts, 430 odd millions of Chinamen. It is the largest question of statesmanship and of commerce to know how best to handle the largest body of men who live together, and have lived together the longest, on the planet, and that speak one language.
But if it is large commercially, what is it in a Christian point of view? We go here and there picking up the scraps and the scattered remnants of races, but look at this majestic aggregation of humanity; look at their tremendous history! It is the largest question to-day before the missionary Christianity of the world.
Well, I am to say a word or two about the Chinese in America. How did they come here? They came here on the invitation of the Americans. California boasted at first of the grand people they were to receive. But that soon changed, and they began a system of ingenious abuse, such as has never been equalled. Take the laws passed by San Francisco—the “basket” law; the “cubic foot of air” law, under which, if a Chinaman was found living in a room with less than 500 cubic feet of air, he was thrust into a prison where he would not have over 200 cubic feet of air; and the “tax” law, under which Chinamen were taxed for sending their children to school and not permitted to send them. Every man in the street took the license himself of breaking every law of God and of humanity by pounding and stoning them. Then, it was not enough for the municipality to seize this question, but the State took hold of it. The Legislature of California settled all ethnological questions at once. They passed a law and said, by majority, that the Chinaman was an Indian! That settled it. Then the nation took hold of it and passed a law—these great 50,000,000 of people against 75,000 of people.
So the nation passed a law to keep the Chinamen out, violating all the traditions of the country, and to import the Chinese wall! They ceased importing the Chinamen and imported their wall—a barbaric, ramshackled old thing of a great many centuries. It was a kind of waistband to the Chinese Empire when it was young; but they burst it long ago and ran over it.
This infamy was carried to this extent. A committee was appointed by the United States Senate, and a corresponding committee from the House, in 1876, to investigate this subject thoroughly. They examined 130 witnesses. They took over 1,200 pages of evidence from experts in all departments in regard to Chinese history and ethnology and everything else. They met them face to face and talked it over. Senator Sargent, the chairman of the Committee, made this statement in his report. He says, in the first place, that the Chinaman is an “indigestible mass.” Well, that is not quite definite; a man hardly knows how to handle such a statement as that. It is a kind of mince-pie, I suppose, in the body politic. I think I shall leave that for the gastric juice to analyze. But his next assertion is more practical. He says that the brain capacity of the Chinaman is not sufficient to furnish motive power for self-government; for all that, he has governed himself since the time that Senator Sargent’s ancestors, assuming him to be an Anglo-Saxon, were cautiously cracking acorns in Northern Europe and wearing bearskins! Mr. Pixley, a gentleman we sent to California from my part of the State of New York, a lawyer, and violently opposed to the Chinaman, says in his opinion before this Committee that the Chinaman is the inferior of any being that God ever made; he says that a specimen cannot be produced that has ever been affected in any particular by Christian influences, and that in his (Pixley’s) opinion the Chinaman hasn’t any soul, or if he has a soul it is not worth saving. Gentlemen, these things have been put into laws and organized before people of influence, and their animus spent itself in that infamous legislation in Congress which abrogated a treaty without consultation and flew in the face of a hundred years of precedents.
What is the fact? Why, the fact is that Chinamen are human beings. They are honest human beings as the rule goes. The word of a Chinese merchant in California is taken everywhere. They are industrious and frugal. Senator Cassidy said—he was very much opposed to them—in this book of testimony to which I have referred: “They are the most ingenious, industrious and frugal people on the planet; and if they come into competition with us in low forms of industry to-day, they will come in higher forms to-morrow.”
There was an old philosopher who lived 500 years before Christ, Confucius by name, who wrote certain maxims; and it does seem as though he was inspired to look ahead precisely at this treaty that they passed at Washington, when he said, “It is an evidence of the superior man, of the great moral man, the true man, that he adheres strictly to the old agreements, however long they may have stood.” He was asked if he could put into one word what would express the whole duty of man, and he said, “Is not that word 'reciprocity'?” (That was a “reciprocity” treaty.) He says, “We should not ask another to do unto us what we would not be willing to do unto him.” And then he says, “The superior man has regard to virtue and to the sanctions of law; but the small man only thinks of himself and what favors he is to receive.” It looks like an inspired and animated riddling of this whole question as it stands to-day before the nation.
One of the largest land proprietors and wheat-growers in California said that the work could not be done without the Chinamen; they have reclaimed two millions of acres.
Now, mind you, with all the wrongs that the Chinese have received on our shores, every little disturbance on the Chinese coast which has ever occurred, or where a mission station has been sacked by a mob, we have collected and been paid every dollar of the damage; and the Chinese Government has paid nearly a million dollars to our Government for the wrongs perpetrated upon American people But this Government has not paid a dollar to the Chinese. There is a claim which the Chinese Embassy are now pressing on the Government, for $40,000 that was destroyed in one night in Colorado; but the reply upon such claims usually is, “We have not been in the habit of paying such claims to Chinamen.” Isn’t that justice? Isn’t that purity of legislation?
The Chinese are an educated people. They have vast libraries, large and broad, rich in literature. They have the lives of great men. They know about our Washington: they teach about him in their schools. Do we know anything about their Washingtons—about their great men who have guided the grandest nation, in some respects, that history has given us any account of for nearly 3,000 years, possibly more? We know about Yung Wing, who graduated at Yale College, taking the prizes in English composition. We know the standing of their students in our colleges generally. We know the fact that of the 75,000 Chinese in this country every one can read and write. In this country, according to the census before the last, we had over 5,000,000 who could not read and write; so that there are hardly Chinamen enough in this country to be schoolmasters to those of our number who cannot read and write! Dr. Hedge in Boston stated some years ago that, in a conversation with Charles Sumner, Sir John Bowring, the representative of Her Majesty at the Court of Pekin, said that when he was there the Chinese Ministers were the superiors of any European cabinet. Mr. Sumner replied: “I am astonished! You do not pretend to compare them with Lord Palmerston, Lord Derby and Mr. Gladstone?” Said he: “I mean precisely what I say, without any invidious comparison; I will add that the Prime Minister of China, during my residence in Pekin, has not, in my opinion, his intellectual superior upon the planet.”
The Chinese are a cleanly people, a decent people. The Chinese laborer washes himself all over every day. As a rule they can come into our mission schools and sit beside our ladies with perfect propriety. When I was preaching in Indianapolis we had every Chinaman in the city in our schools. They are not a clannish people; they are glad for American society.
They have crimes and vices. They are human. They lie and steal, and gamble, and have their peculiar method of getting intoxicated with opium. But I don’t know as it ever has been proven that they can carry on lying to such a magnificent extent as we do in an ordinary political campaign, and they have never risen to the refined plundering of Wall street. They say they take opium, and you know how they took it—they took it at the cannon’s mouth at first. England must make 400 per cent. profit in the poppy fields of India. It was shocking to them to the utmost; and their torment has gone on ever since in homes that were never addicted to any crazier drug than tea and knew nothing of a hell so orthodox as the delirium tremens. The Emperor petitioned England, in a document which I think has not its equal in all the documents of Governments, not to set fire to the morals of his people by loading them with their accursed opium. But they did.
The Chinese worship their ancestors. Well, if I had to choose the least of two improprieties, I think I would prefer to pay a very hearty and cordial appreciation of my grandfather rather than to curse my children with such doctrines as have been proposed toward the Chinese. It is better, I think, to worship your ancestors than to damn your posterity.
But the Chinese have noble qualities. In the days of the yellow fever at Memphis I was near it. We almost felt the hot breath of that dreadful pestilence. We needed money and men; and there came a telegram from San Francisco that the Chinese merchants of that city had contributed $12,000 for the yellow fever sufferers. That looked like putting the prayer of Christ upon the cross into physical results: “Lord, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
We know the Chinese philosophy, the height of their morality; we know the purity of Confucius’ recommendations and the wondrous statement of Lotse that we should love our enemies; and we know that the highest crest waves of this Chinese morality throw spray around the feet of Jesus. I have stood this summer in the far West. I have stood where you can test civilization. There in Seattle stood a university on our right hand, and on it the Indian words Al-Ki—by and by—the motto of the Territory—“By and by we will show you.” Brethren, I am not given to nightmares nor to day dragons, but it did seem to me as we stood there and looked out upon that majestic sheet of water, Puget Sound, being nearer in the centre of the majority of the population in the planet than we are here, that the day would come, with that matchless harbor, that wonderful climate, with coal and iron in the vicinity, with all cereals and fruits possible, when the throne of power would be transferred from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast, and when the argosies of the world would float without any bar, either in Puget Sound or in the cities around it, and ride there at peace in the security of a gospelized and millennialized age. It can only be done by our appreciation of the necessity of keeping our Christianity clean and solid and aggressive, and on the old basis of sin and salvation through a crucified Redeemer.