At the Great Day, when the Master shall surprise you, humble Christian, with a benediction for service rendered to His brethren among these despised ones, and you deprecatingly answer, when and where, His revealing response may be—when you reached them with your prayers and your substance through that Association which offered you its means of operation. And surely all its workers among these outcast peoples, in the ostracism and opposition and hatred which confront them, may even in this life have their abundant recompense in this, that they are serving those whom the Master owns as “these my brethren.”
FIVE TESTS OF AMERICAN CIVILIZATION.
Notes of an Address at the Annual Meeting.
BY PROF. C. D. HARTRANFT, D. D. HARTFORD, CONN.
(1.) The Indians, the Negroes and the Chinese I regard as the divinely appointed agents by which the principles that underlie American civilization are to be finally tested. Every utterance on the Fourth of July, from the Declaration of Independence till this hour, has made the right of asylum a pre-eminent feature of American civilization. So whenever a man has been impelled by the dictates of his conscience to leave his native land and seek a foreign shore, that he might not be compelled to live in false alliance with the Church and worship God in a way he did not elect; whenever a man, full of noble impulses, has felt the hopelessness of his life, so far as any ambitious scheme was concerned; or the education of his children—a man feeling the tyranny of continuous labor, without the possibility of accumulation—this man has ever been gladly welcomed to America. So the Puritan, so the Huguenot, so the Dutchman, so the Lutheran—whatever a man’s religious training, America has given him hearty greeting. Even the atheist and the infidel have found a refuge under the folds of this flag. America has welcomed them to the shadow of her pines and palmettoes and to her golden Pacific. But what a niggardly right of asylum does she give to the poor Negro, as he is emancipated from his bonds; and to the wretched Indian, whom she shuts up in Western territories; and, most of all, to the poor Chinaman, as he comes from his joss-house, with the instincts of a higher civilization impelling him from the stagnation of centuries to the shores of the Pacific!
It behooves us to inquire whether this precious right of asylum is to be denied to the weaker races; whether we are going to lose this peculiar feature of our nation, that throws its broad land open to the world. Is it not true now, as in the past, that this is a vast sanctuary, and that if a man lays hold of the horns of its altar, there shall be nothing to drag him from his possession of freedom? He stands on holy ground. In the British islands, the races that have appeared in its history have been amalgamated—welded by the mace and the battle-axe. In France, the various tribes and races that, one after another, possessed that land, were woven together, in warp and woof, by fire and blood. In Germany, the Prussians have brought together that great mass of people as one, through bitter and tremendous wars, the echoes of which have scarce died away. America proposes a far different solution. She recognizes the nobility of the characteristics developed by the various races. She wants the African, the Chinaman, the Teuton—all races—to labor side by side; to develop not only her wealth and prosperity, but, most of all, the typical American humanity.
American civilization can better endure the savagery of the Indian, the ignorance and brutality of the Negro, and the semi-civilization of the Chinese, than it can afford to fraternize with a civilization that is impregnated with a spirit of ecclesiasticism, or endure the philosophies of St. Louis or the Internationals. Rather is it for us to overcome these forces that are the outcroppings of centuries of Roman development, as well as those of Indian or Chinese or Negro semi-civilization.
This right of asylum involves another thing—the right of a man to say, “I will leave this land and go to another”—the right to migrate if he does not find things subservient to him. We once hailed the Irishman to come and build our railroads. We welcome the German now, as he comes and terraces our mountains and teaches us how to garden. We welcome the Frenchman—we welcome all. But we say, “Lo! poor Indian, go West. East of the Appalachian is too good for you; we want it. Go West; go West. We will give no rest to the soles of your feet.” Do we want the Black Hills? Migrate! We will surround you with a cordon of soldiers and a cordon of Government agents, who will eat the life out of you. Keep on, poor ignorant, keep on!