ADDRESS OF REV. HENRY A. STIMSON, D.D.
Referring to Dr. Goodwin's powerful address, I find myself transported again to China; but the fact recurs to my mind that this is not a foreign missionary society, but a home missionary one, and what we have to do is to open our minds to the conviction that it is possible to do at home plenty of work for the Chinaman. I am glad to give a little personal testimony because what we need most of all is to be convinced of the necessity to give time and strength and labor to win the individual Chinaman to Christ. Not very long ago there came to my knowledge in St. Louis an ordinary Chinaman, comparatively a young man. He joined our church and I knew he desired to be recognized as a Christian man. About a year before, he had been a member of a Sunday-school where ladies were teaching Chinese. Before that our newspapers had created great outcry about a case of leprosy in the city. This Chinaman appeared at my house in great trepidation. He had been two or three years in this country, and had been saving his money in order to go back and see his mother's face before she would die, and he hoped to be able to return to China in the following fall. He had learned that there was a Chinaman, unknown to him, lying ill in a little laundry, of a disease of which nothing was known, without friends and without care. He took care of this man, leaving his own work for the purpose, and at length he came to me asking where he could get a physician to attend the patient. I gave him a note to one of the best physicians in my own church, who went at once and saw the man, and he seeing it was a strange form of disease, went to a specialist of skin diseases, who had the man brought to a hospital in order to watch his disease. Rumors of this reaching the newspapers, the reporters thought it a good opportunity to make a story about leprosy, giving the number and street of an imaginary laundry in the heart of the city. Instantly the patronage of the Chinese laundries stopped. My Chinese friend was in the greatest distress about it, and particularly about me, lest I should think he had brought the contagious disease to my house. I could hardly persuade him to enter, and then he told me there was no truth in the story of the newspapers, and asked what he should do. What was the result of the story? The Chinaman took care of his friend in the house and in the hospital, paying considerable for his care, and when he recovered sent him to San Francisco—in fact, spent about $180 on him, the whole sum he had saved to take himself home to his mother, and he did this for a man who was as utterly unknown to him as to you or me. He also came to me with a $10 bill to pay the doctor, saying it was not enough, but it was all the money he had, and he would add to it by and by. All we want is testimony as to the character of the Chinese. Here was a man not converted by Moody or by any service, but by the ministry of an unknown Sunday-school teacher; as the result of that simple agency he found a charity so Christ-like as to do work like this. That little Chinaman brought to me some of his companions, asking me to do something to help them to be Christians, and as the result of his work a large Sunday-school is to-day in operation. There is abundance of such testimony, I believe, to be furnished throughout our land, which we should have before our heart as an answer to the anti-Chinese mania which now and then sweeps over this country. Help us to carry the gospel to these men of unmeasured possibilities, whom God in his mercy has brought across the seas to plead at our doors.
This audience can help the Chinese in a better way than giving them money. That Chinaman was asked in my house the other day how many hours he slept, and he said, "Two or three." "Are you ever troubled by hoodlums?" "Yes, every day. They break the windows. Last week they broke into my laundry and stole five bundles of clothes, for which I had to pay customers $20." "Do you get no protection from the police?" I asked him. He shook his head—yes, sometimes, but they were no good. The Chinese have the same right to life and liberty that we have, and if we get them that, they'll get the money fast enough themselves. We owe it to the Chinese that they get protection.