TEMPERANCE AMONG OUR CHINESE.
REV. W. C. POND.
The Chinese have never patronized to any appreciable extent the saloons of California. It is shrewdly suspected that this is the very front of their offending. If the money these laborers earned went into the tills of our liquor dealers, the conventions these liquor dealers so largely control would look at the laborers themselves with different eyes. But a Chinaman asked to drink replies (so the story goes): “Me no drinkee whiskee. Make one Chinaman allee same Melican, No. 1 fool.”
HOODLUMS AT STREET CORNER, SAN FRANCISCO
I think, however, that American civilization is at last making itself felt among our Chinese, for I believe that I have passed, in this city, one small saloon where a Chinaman stood behind the bar, and some of his countrymen in front of it. I never saw a Chinaman drunk, though I have heard that the sight might be seen. But this, too, is recent, and my impression of the aversion to intoxicating drinks, as a national characteristic, was, till lately, so strong, that for many years I had nothing to say to our Christian Chinese on the subject, except as it came up incidentally in the course of Bible study. It is within a year that it came to my knowledge that a stimulating and slightly intoxicating drink, which they call in English, wine, is made from rice, and used among them more or less at banquets, though not, I think, at ordinary meals. The discovery of this fact, and that even our most advanced and reliable Christians were not total abstainers, has led us to preach among them this gospel also. It has been readily accepted. The duty, under our circumstances, of total abstinence seems to be understood, and duty understood becomes, I believe, with these brethren, unquestioned law.
Respecting opium, the voice of the mission has from the first been clear, positive and unmistakable. I cannot claim that we have reached many who had become addicted to this vice; indeed, I cannot now recall one among those whom I have baptized who had used the drug enough to make it hard to do without it. Generally I have been told that they have never used it at all. It ought perhaps to be a shame to us that we have not reached and rescued slaves to this vice. Certainly, if any door should open by which an effectual work of this sort could be set forward, it ought to be entered upon with intensest zeal. But the most that we have seen it possible to do thus far has been to pledge all who come into our Congregational Association of Christian Chinese, not to gamble and not to use opium. These are the items of external conduct upon which special emphasis is laid. A brother overtaken in either of these faults would be dealt with at once in a discipline, the chief danger of which would be that it might be too prompt and too severe: a zeal to make the protest of the brotherhood against the sin decisive and unmistakable preventing due patience and long suffering in the effort to “restore” and “gain” the erring one.