ost unnoticed, the Orient is
telescoping its way into the very heart of the Occident, and with
fearful portent and peril, particularly to the Western woman.

This is not what is desired, but it will be inevitable. Exclusion
laws must finally give way before the pressure. Already the Orient is
knocking vigorously at the door of the Occident, and unless admission
is granted soon, measures of retaliation will be operated to force an
entrance. How to administer them the Orient already knows, for has
not the door to his domicile been already forced open by the Western
trader? The Orient is fast arming for the conflict.

The men of the days of sailing vessels, who went to the far East and
made sport of and trampled upon the virtue of the women of a weaker
nation, have not all died in peace, leaving their vices far off
and gathering virtues about them to crown their old age with
venerableness. Some have lived to see that whatsoever man soweth that
shall he also reap. They have lived to see the tide setting in in the
other direction, and the human wreckage of past vices swept by the
current of immigration close to their own domicile. Their own children
are in danger of being engulfed in the polluting flood of Oriental
life in our midst. After many days vices come home. Man sowed the
wind; the whirlwind must be reaped. The Oriental slave trader and the
Oriental slave promise to become a terrible menace and scourge to our
twentieth century civilization. Herein lies great peril to American
womanhood. Whether we wish it to be so or not,--whether we perceive
from the first that it is so or not, there is a solidarity of
womanhood that men and women must reckon with. The man who wrongs
another's daughter perceives afterwards that he wronged his own
daughter thereby. We cannot, without sin against humanity, ask the
scoffer's question, "Am I my sister's keeper?"--not even concerning
the poorest and meanest foreign woman, for the reason that _she is
our sister_. The conditions that surround the Hong Kong slave girl in
California are bound in time to have their influence upon the social,
legal and moral status of all California women, and later of all
American womanhood.

In considering the life history of the Chinese woman living in our
Chinatowns in America, therefore, we are studying matters of vital
importance to us. And in order to a clear understanding of the matter,
we must go back to the beginning of the slave-trade which has b