Respectfully Submitted,
W. A. Bartlett, Chairman.
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.”