smuggling Chinese from Vancouver's
Island to our forbidden soil. Certain it is that many Chinese,
failing to get tickets at Hong Kong for San Francisco, buy them to
Victoria. Already it becomes a serious question what fence can be
built along our northern frontier so close, so strong, so high that
no Chinese can anywhere climb over, or crawl under, or work through.
Mexico wants the Chinese, we hear. How far is it from the northern
line of Mexico to the southern line of California and Arizona? And
once across that line our Chinese invaders, coming slyly one by one,
have won the fight and go and come at their own pleasure.
Exclusion has not solved this problem, and it is safe to add that, as
it should not, so it never will. For this policy is in contradiction
to the vital principles of our national existence; and either it must
be abandoned, or sooner or later this contradiction will develop into
conflict irrepressible. Those vital principles are two: "All men
created equal," and "All men endowed with certain inalienable
rights," etc. Our fathers counted them to be self-evident, and placed
them as twin pillars in our temple of liberty. Now, a nation cannot
knock out its own foundation stones, cannot defy the laws of its own
organic life without becoming divided against itself; and in the
conflict ensuing, either its vital principles will be reaffirmed and
rehabilitated, or else the nation dies. We have had one lesson at
this point, and we ought not to need another for a dozen centuries.
Exclusion is only a make-shift of the politicians, not the offspring
of real statesmanship. It has not solved the problem, and it never
will.
What then shall we do? Educate and Christianize these heathen, we
reply: So you will make them to be Chinese no longer, but Americans.
This is the right answer, but, alas, how much easier said than done!
The undertaking, hard enough at first, grows harder, in some
respects, as the years roll on.
One added difficulty is the wider diffusion of these strangers over
our whole country. The prejudice which their peculiarities excite is
thus extended, while the number to be reached in any one locality is
diminished. Work for the Chinese ought now to be prosecuted, not
simply in Sunday schools, but in Mission schools, kept in session
every evening and alt through the year in most of the principal
cities of the whole Union, as well as on the Pacific Coast. But the
outward and visible encouragements wil
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