There are thousands of high-minded Christian people who are unselfishly and lovingly toiling for the temporal and spiritual welfare of this Asiatic population in America. They rightly feel that the people of the United States have a special duty towards these Orientals, that the purifying power of Christianity can remove the dangers incident to their presence in our communities, and that if we treat them aright they will, on their return to China, mightily influence their countrymen. But the kindly efforts of these Christian people are unfortunately insufficient to offset the general policy of the American people as a whole, especially as that policy is embodied in a stern law that is most harshly enforced.
Americans are apt to think of themselves as China's best friends and the facts stated show that there is some ground for the claim. But before we exalt ourselves overmuch, we might profitably read the correspondence between the Chinese Ministers at Washington and our Secretaries of State regarding the outrages upon Chinese in the United States. Many Chinese have suffered from mob violence in San Francisco and Tacoma and other Pacific Coast cities almost as sorely as Americans have suffered in China. Some years ago, they were wantonly butchered in Rock Springs, Wyoming, and it was as difficult for the Chinese to get indemnity out of our Government as it was for the Powers to get indemnity out of China for the Boxer outrages.
President Cleveland, in a message to Congress in 1885, felt obliged to make an allusion to this that was doubtless as humiliating to him as it was to decent Americans everywhere. The Chinese Minister to the United States, in his presentation of the case to Secretary of State Bayard, ``massed the evidence going to show that the massacre of the subjects of a friendly Power, residing in this country, was as unprovoked as it was brutal; that the Governor and Prosecuting Attorney of the Territory openly declared that no man could be punished for the crime, though the murderers attempted no concealment; and that all the pretended judicial proceedings were a burlesque.'' All this Mr. Bayard was forced to admit. Indeed he did not hesitate to characterize the proceedings as ``the wretched travesty of the forms of justice,'' nor did he conceal his ``indignation at the bloody outrages and shocking wrongs inflicted upon a body of your countrymen,'' and his mortification that ``such a blot should have been cast upon the record of our Government.'' There was sarcastic significance in the cartoon of the Chicago Inter-Ocean representing a Chinese reading a daily paper one of whose columns was headed ``Massacre of Americans in China,'' while the other column bore the heading, ``Massacre of Chinese in America.'' Uncle Sam stands at his elbow and ejaculates, ``Horrible, isn't it?'' To which the Celestial blandly inquires, ``Which?''
In the North American Review for March, 1904, Mr. Wong Kai Kah, an educated Chinese gentleman, plainly but courteously discusses this subject under the caption of ``A Menace to America's Oriental Trade.'' He justly complains that though the exclusion law expressly exempts Chinese merchants, students and travellers, yet as a matter of fact a Chinese gentleman is treated on his arrival as if he were a criminal and is ``detained in the pen on the steamship wharf or imprisoned like a felon until the customs officials are satisfied.''
The Hon. Chester Holcombe, formerly Secretary of the American Legation at Peking and a member of the Chinese Immigration Commission of 1880, cites some illlustrations of the harshness and unreasonableness of the exclusion law.[45] A Chinese merchant of San Francisco visited his native land and brought back a bride, only to find that she was forbidden to land on American soil. Another Chinese merchant and wife, of unquestioned standing in San Francisco, made a trip to China, and while there a child was born. On returning to their home in America, the sapient officials could interpose no objection to the readmission of the parents, but peremptorily refused to admit the three-months old baby, as, never having been in this country, it had no right to enter it! Neither of these preposterous decisions could be charged to the stupidity or malice of the local officials, for both were appealed to the Secretary of the Treasury in Washington and were officially sustained by him as in accordance with the law, though in the latter case, the Secretary, then the Hon. Daniel Manning, in approving the action, had the courageous good sense to write: ``Burn all this correspondence, let the poor little baby go ashore, and don't make a fool of yourself.''
[45] Article in The Outlook, April 23, 1904.
Still more irritating and insulting, if that were possible, was the treatment of the Chinese exhibitors at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition at St. Louis in 1904. Our Government formally invited China to participate, sending a special commission to Peking to urge acceptance. China accepted in good faith, and then the Treasury Department in Washington drew up a series of regulations requiring ``that each exhibitor, upon arrival at any seaport in this country, should be photographed three times for purposes of identification, and should file a bond in the penal sum of $5,000, the conditions of which were that he would proceed directly and by the shortest route to St. Louis, would not leave the Exposition grounds at any time after his arrival there, and would depart for China by the first steamer sailing after the close of the Exposition. Thus a sort of Chinese rogues' gallery was to be established at each port, and the Fair grounds were to be made a prison pen for those who had come here as invited guests of the nation, whose presence and aid were needed to make the display a success. It is only just to add that, upon a most vigorous protest made against these courteous(?) regulations by the Chinese Government and a threat to cancel their acceptance or our invitation, the rules were withdrawn and others more decent substituted. But the fact that they were prepared and seriously presented to China shows to what an extent of injustice and discourtesy our mistaken attitude and action in regard to Chinese immigration has carried us.''
No right-minded American can read without poignant shame, Luella Miner's recent account[46] of the experiences of Fay Chi Ho and Kung Hsiang Hsi, two Chinese students who, after showing magnificent devotion to American missionaries during the horrors of the Boxer massacres, sought to enter the United States. They were young men of education and Christian character who wished to complete their education at Oberlin College, but they were treated by the United States officials at San Francisco and other cities with a suspicion and brutality that were ``more worthy of Turkey than of free Christian America.'' Arriving at the Golden Gate, September 12, 1901, it was not until January 10, 1903, that they succeeded in reaching Oberlin, and those sixteen months were filled with indignities from which all the efforts of influential friends and of the Chinese Minister to the United States were unable to protect them. Whatever reasons there may be for excluding coolie labourers, there can be none for excluding the bright young men who come here to study. ``An open door for our merchants, our railway projectors, our missionaries, we cry, and at the same time we slam the door in the faces of Chinese merchants and travellers and students—the best classes who seek our shores.''
[46] ``Two Heroes of Cathay,'' p. 223 sq.
The fear that the Chinese would inundate the United States if they were permitted to come under the same conditions as Europeans is not justified by the numbers that came before the exclusion laws became so stringent, the total Chinese population of the United States up to 1880, when there was no obstacle to their coming except the general immigration law, being only 105,465—the merest handful among our scores of millions of people. The objections that they are addicted to gambling and immorality, that they come only for temporary mercenary purposes and that they do not become members of the body politic but segregate themselves in special communities, might be urged with equal justice by the Chinese against the foreign communities in the port cities of China. Segregating themselves, indeed! How can the Chinese help themselves, when they are not allowed to become naturalized and are treated with a dislike and contempt which force them back upon one another?