Money compensation is a very poor return as an offset to outrage. Congress passed the bill appropriating $147,750 to indemnify the Chinese sufferers from the Rock Springs riots. Hon. Wm. Walter Phelps, representative from New Jersey, spoke words upon its passage for which every Christian in the country must feel grateful. Said he:
“I want to pay this amount because the Chinese Government asked for that sum. The sum represents only the property destroyed. The Chinese Government knows that our Government never likes to pay a claim in full, so it wisely presents its bill only for the property destroyed, and says nothing of 28 men murdered—nothing of 15 men wounded—nothing of 700 Chinese hunted for ten days with club and rifle like rabbits, until they were dispersed into the wilderness and their village was made an ash heap.
“In the time when Great Britain was at war with China, an American citizen named Edwards was arrested by mistake as an Englishman, imprisoned from sunrise to sunset, and then released. The Chinese Government paid $31,600 for the injury done to his person and to the dignity of the United States. There were 700 Chinese who suffered at Rock Springs—all of them more than this man. We hesitate to pay them $200 each. Recall the familiar story of heathen generosity—how China once gave us $700,000 and said: ‘Take it and pay the claims of your citizens.’ We took it; we paid the claims with twelve per cent. interest, and there was enough left to return $200,000 to the Chinese Government.
“If this seems ancient history, long after the Rock Springs massacre there was a riot in Ching King. The rabble destroyed property belonging to the American Methodist Missionary Society. The Chinese Government has already paid $25,000 for these losses; and also, since our discussion on this bill, a riot, under similar circumstances, at Shanghai, destroyed other missionary property. The Chinese Government has paid this bill too, $5,000.
“I have no heart to speak of the obligations founded in the international law. I don’t want even to refer to the treaty, where we pledged ourselves to exert all our powers to devise measures for the protection of Chinese subjects in this country. It is not on the ground of legal, but of the moral obligations that I prefer to rest this claim.”
Our treatment of the Indians is very much like the way a kindly parent allows his judgment to be at the mercy of the pranks of his mischievous boy. The boy takes a stick, and chasing a dog, pokes it and pounds it till the maddened brute turns upon his tormentor and bites him. This enrages the father, who forthwith takes his gun and shoots the dog. In strict justice he ought to have taken the stick and applied it to the back of the boy. The good man had no ill will whatever toward the dog, nor would he ever have thought of shooting it had the poor brute been let alone and not tantalized into biting the boy. But the dog having been enraged so as to become dangerous, there was nothing left but to destroy it. White men—some of them not even citizens of the United States—in violation of law enter the Indian reservation, steal the Indians’ ponies, drive off their cattle, shoot down a few of the Indians for resisting them, or perhaps for the mere fun of the thing. The Indians, maddened by the wrongs inflicted upon them, go on the war-path. The savage stirred with anger strikes back, and the innocent with the guilty—if indeed the guilty do not go scot free—are made to suffer. Had the Indian been let alone he would have remained peaceful and quiet and friendly. But by desperadoes he has been maddened to go on the war-path in vengeance, to retaliate for wrongs he has suffered. Then follow the blood-curdling stories of ambuscade and massacre. Popular indignation is roused. Extermination of the Indian is demanded. There is nothing left now for Uncle Sam to do but to send his army and put the Indian down. A pity that the chastisement cannot be inflicted on those whose wickedness started the mischief.