John

SHOULD he be encouraged to come? The Irish of California − in 1860 one tenth of the entire population − think not. So does Senator Casserly, himself of Irish blood ; and the fact that he is a man of thoughtfulness, culture, and generally liberal views makes his intense feeling on this subject all the more striking and illustrative. Last summer the merchants of San Francisco welcomed a large number of representative men from Chicago in a banquet at which the Governor of California, several United States Senators, and two hundred gentlemen prominent in the professions and in business, were present. But when six leading Chinese merchants entered the hall, habited in rich, elaborately ornamented native costumes, and .Mr. Casserly saw that they were to participate in the festivities, he seized his hat and abruptly disappeared !

The contractor or manufacturer who wants ten, or ten hundred, or ten thousand Chinese laborers, orders them through a San Francisco firm exactly as he would order an invoice of cotton or sugar. If the number is too large to be obtained in California, the firm in turn makes a requisition for them upon its agents in China, and in due time they are delivered. The firm pays their passage, taking a lien upon their labor to reimburse itself. When set to work on railroads or kindred enterprises, they organize into gangs of about thirty, each of which selects a head man. He purchases supplies for them from the house which brought them into the country, and through these sales the house obtains its profits. Mr. Casserly denounces this system as importation, not immigration, and as ruinous to the interests of white workmen. “John Chinaman,” argues the senator, in effect, “is a most frugal man, a most patient laborer, often a most cunningly skilled mechanic, and therefore − we do not want him ! ” This, too, in a country whose supreme need is labor, both skilled and unskilled,− a country with only half a million of inhabitants now, but with resources waiting to be developed which would easily support fifty millions. Indeed, it must contain eighty-three millions before its population to the square mile will equal that of little Belgium.

Encountering Mr. Casserly on a Pacific Railway train last summer, I asked him, “ How can you stop the Chinese immigration ?” He replied, “ By legal prohibition.” In spite of the great difficulties which have hitherto existed in the way of leaving China, and in spite of the gross and cruel abuse encountered after reaching California, more than a hundred thousand of these people have already come ; but not even this glaring fact seems to have suggested to the senator that the inexorable law of demand and supply has something to do with the matter ! He is a melancholy example of the effect of even a short residence in the official atmosphere of Washington. The average congressional mind entertains no doubt that if an act requiring the Mississippi to turn and run up hill were passed by both Houses and signed by the President, the Mississippi would do it. Legislation against this immigration would be like making it a penal offence for the winds to blow on Telegraph Hill, or the tides to rise and fall at the Golden Gate, and it would be quite as effective as such an enactment.

The thing lies in a nutshell. Yonder stretches a vast country which has men and don’t want them ; here lies a vast country which wants men and has not got them. Twenty-nine days and forty dollars will bring an immigrant from one to the other ; and capitalists always stand ready to pay his passage and take the chances of getting their money back. Already the monthly ships of the Pacific Mail Company ordinarily bring one thousand two hundred Chinamen, and single sailing-vessels often half as many more. It only remains for us to accept John as destiny and make the best of him. He has come, thus far, only in the form of a scout to spy out the land, but close behind follow his serried columns,−

During the next five years the Chinese Empire can send us as many people as all who live to-day Under the American flag, without missing them more than the North missed the boys who went South to fight for the Union. Within ten years it can send us fifty millions, and even then not spare so large a percentage of its population as Ireland has given us during an equal period ?

What is he doing? John began as a house-servant, and still finds most of his employment in that capacity. As a natural cook he has no equal, except in the Frenchman. His person he keeps religiously clean, washing himself all over every day in the year. At first, housekeepers say, he may mix his bread by filling his mouth with water, and then blowing it out over the flour ; but a little training soon cures him of this. He is ready to sweep, to make beds, and to walk of errands, − for John is deliberate, and seldom runs. Entrust children to his care, and he will dandle them in his arms, or trundle them in their carriages, or amuse them with playthings, with the same calmness, sobriety, and patience which he would bring to the building of the Great Wall. Labor is so abundant in his native country that he has been taught to do everything with the nicest carefulness, with the most absolute thoroughness. He is mighty in the laundry. He does up shirts like an artist, and never forgets to sew on the buttons. In Sacramento, night after night, I heard at short intervals, from my hotel windows, a peculiar “whir − whir−whir,” in the street below. At first I fancied that it must be “ de crim night-waechter ” of Hans Breitmann, giving the all’s-well signal to his comrades. But finally I discovered that the sound came from a Chinese laundry just across the street, where John was sprinkling clothes by blowing water upon them through a hollow reed. Usually he sprinkles them directly from his mouth, − a process better adapted to linen than to bread. That laundry, I believe, was never closed, by day, by night, or on Sunday.

John has always taken kindly to mining. In vain did the State impose an extra and unjust tax upon him; he paid it,−when he was obliged to,− and continued to work like a beaver. In vain did white men drive him out when he found a rich lead. He only fell back to delve away in some abandoned placer ; and if he earned one dollar a day he would save more money in the course of a year than the American who took out five dollars from richer diggings.

But he could not be exclusively house-servant, washerman, and miner. Gradually he took up other pursuits. He proved extremely useful as a farmhand ; and he has pressed more and more into that employment. Just now, the Democratic politician of California, a little bewildered to find his ancient cry of “nigger” no longer effective, is lustily shouting “ Chinaman ” instead ; but he employs Johnny on his ranch, in his vineyard, his dwelling, his store, and his factory, just as his Republican neighbor does. Diligent inquiry has not brought to my knowledge a single instance of his discriminating in favor of “ the interests of white labor,” where it has involved the expenditure of one additional dollar per month.

In the remote antiquity of five years ago half a dozen Sacramento gentlemen began to build the Pacific Railroad. White labor was not merely costly : it was absolutely unattainable. Chinamen therefore were brought in, and in the spring of 1865 they began to swarm upon the Sierras like flies upon a honeycomb. So deep was the hostility against them that it was found necessary to give them military protection until their growing numbers enabled them to defend themselves. At last twelve thousand were working upon the road. But for them the locomotive would not have rolled across the continent for two years yet. The company, after four years of trial, reported that they had proved nearly as efficient as Irish laborers for the hardest kind of work, and far more tractable and trustworthy. Strikes, drunken brawls, bloody riots, were all unknown among them. They did, without question, murmur, or delay, whatever they were told to do. They did not stop for Sunday − nor did any one else employed on the road ; but about once in ten days John would take a holiday. He received from $ 30 to $ 35 per month in gold. Of this he would save from $ 20 to $ 23, and send the most of it home to China. The company are so well satisfied with his work that they no longer confine him to construction and repairs, but are introducing him into their operating-force. He begins to find employment, too, upon the Union Pacific line,−from Omaha to Utah,− which at one time was paying $4 per day, currency, to Pat, while the Central obtained John for $ 1 in gold. He is working upon the new roads which are building in California, and ultimately he will be engaged upon all our great public works.

Simultaneously with his appearance upon the Central Pacific Railroad another great avenue was opened to him. An enormous woollen-mill had been erected in San Francisco, at a cost of three quarters of a million of dollars. Its products were exceedingly popular: for California woollen goods then, as now, were the best made in the United States ; but financially it was a failure. Louis McLane, one of the most sagacious business-men on the coast, was induced to make a searching examination into its affairs. He reported to the stockholders : “ Dear labor is the obstacle to your success. Stop paying American workmen three dollars a day, and substitute Chinamen at a dollar and a quarter, and then you will make money.” The suggestion was adopted. — of course, against the fiercest opposition. Were not the yellow men taking the bread out of the mouths of the white men ? Now that company employs four hundred and fifty Chinamen, at one dollar per day, the workmen boarding themselves. Some do not earn more than fifty cents, and others are worth two dollars ; but they are paid through their agent at the rate of one dollar for each, and left to distribute the compensation among themselves. After five years’ experience, they are found perfectly satisfactory as operatives, and they are now employed in nearly or quite every one of the dozen woollen-factories on the coast.

John makes boots, and shoes, and clothing, and all the cigars that are manufactured in California. He peddles fish, fruit, and vegetables. He finds abundant employment in the great vineyards and orchards. Give him a cluster of grapes or a pear for a sample, and he will pluck from trees or vines all fruit at the same stage of ripeness, with the greatest precision.

Occasionally he appears in the character of a merchant. He is at the head of some very heavy San Francisco firms, which are branches of old houses in China. Here he is noted for exactness and fair dealing, and often for high commercial ability. Many American houses, both city and country, deal with him, particularly in teas and rice, and accord to him that hearty respect which brains and success usually command. A dozen of the Chinese merchants of San Francisco are men of great wealth ; some are partners in Hong-Kong firms which are reputed to possess a capital of fifty million dollars. The six who assisted at the Lick House banquet are men conspicuous for culture, character, and capacity. One of them, Fung-Tang, speaks Chinese, Japanese, French, and German with fluency, and replied to a toast in English, in one of the most pointed, sensible, and compact dinner-speeches that the Eastern guests had ever heard. It would be difficult to find another spectacle at once so melancholy and so ludicrous as that of a senator of the United States resenting the presence of such men at a public banquet as an indignity to himself and his race !

John presides over several large establishments filled with knick-knacks from Japan and China, which visitors from the East purchase to take home as curiosities. Most of these articles illustrate his ingenuity and marvellous patience. There are tables and workboxes, each composed of thousands of bits of highly polished, many-colored woods ; glove-boxes of lacquered ware, resembling papier maché, which sell for two dollars and a half and three dollars, gold ; handkerchiefs of grass cloth, embroidered by hand with infinite pains; countless varieties of children’s toys, including many curious and intricate puzzles ; sleeve-buttons and breastpins ; card-racks of various material ; wooden and metallic counterfeits of insects and reptiles, so perfect that one half fears to handle them lest they should bite his fingers ; gay Chinese lanterns covered with painted paper and as large as market-baskets ; firecrackers ; torpedoes which explode with a report like that of a twelve-pounder ; chop-sticks ; writing-desks ; and a thousand other things to please the fancy. In waiting upon American customers, Johnny shows himself the model merchant. He is an adept in the simple art of not too much. He proffers a Chinese cigar (execrable in flavor), and is grieved if his visitor does not take at least a few whiffs from it. If the purchases are liberal in amount, he makes a judicious discount in the prices, and perhaps throws in some trifling gifts. He is attentive, but not over-pressing; cordial, but never impertinent ; and he speeds the parting guest with a good-by so polite and friendly that it leaves a pleasant flavor in the memory.

His advance into the highly-skilled industries is sharply contested, but his sure progress demonstrates that all things are his who has patience. Thus far, in the anomalous life of California, labor has been stronger than capital, and has had things much in its own way. In hand or placer mining, John has been graciously allowed the gleanings ; but quartz-mining has been closed to him. Not only has he been kept from digging ore in the shafts and reducing it under the stamps, but even when owners have employed him to cut and haul wood for the mills he has been driven away with riot and bloodshed. California working-men are in many respects the most intelligent in the world ; but they sometimes show a narrowness and ignorance worthy of the dark ages. More than once they have presented the astonishing spectacle of skilled laborers, in a country of tree schools and cheap newspapers, resisting with violence the introduction of a new invention, on the ground that it diminished the necessity for hand labor ! A hundred years ago there might have been some excuse ; but at this day every American ought to know that any ingenious contrivance which makes iron, or steel, or steam, or chemical combinations do the work of human muscles, tends inevitably to his ultimate benefit and that of his children. Very recently California miners united in a strike against the use of a new powder in the quartz-veins, because it is so much more powerful than the old that it renders less drilling necessary. No wonder that such men should resist the cheap labor of an alien race.

But almost every strike enlarges the field that is open to John Chinaman. He is not yet in the quartz-mines, − unless in a few rare instances, where he has bought mines himself, − but he is certain to be there ; for the law of trade, which impels capital to employ the cheapest obtainable labor, is as irresistible as the law of gravitation. Last July, the working quartz-miners in our newest El Dorado, the White Pine district of Nevada, struck for five dollars per day. One company − one of the many on the Pacific coast which employ over a hundred miners − closed up its works, and kept a capital of a million of dollars lying idle, for the simple reason that it could not payexpenses at that price. At the same moment it could have hired a hundred Chinese laborers, just as efficient as the strikers, at one dollar and a half per day. The matter was finally compromised by paying the old miners four dollars ; but even upon that rate the company could have saved two hundred and fifty dollars per day, or almost eighty thousand dollars a year, by the substitution of Chinamen. No labor combinations or fear of bloodshed can make such a condition of things permanent. It is only a question of time. Whenever the change comes the present miners will suffer seriously at first; but at the end of five years they will be better off, and a much larger proportion of them will have become employers.

The same is true of the machinists, and other leading and influential mechanical workmen among whom John has not yet found his way. His path has been smoother toward the raising of silk-worms and of olives, the culture of the tea-plant, the making of wine, and the other new and peculiar industries of the coast, which seem capable of boundless expansion, and are well adapted to his training and capacity. He has pushed his way into many paths which are not noted here. He begins to buy land, instead of leasing it, for the production of fruits and vegetables. Negro minstrelsy, which, like so many other things, grows more luxuriantly in California than in the East, and is more an abstract and brief chronicle of the time, already makes him the central figure in its broadest burlesques, the putative father of its most atrocious jokes. He has become a part of the warp and woof of life on the Pacific coast.

What manner of man is he ? Very black of hair, very low of stature, and not a thing of beauty. In laughter he shows his gums horribly. But he is seldom The Man Who Laughs, except among his own mates. With Americans, when he is not addressed, he is immovably serene, silent, and serious. He is a born gambler. Whatever his age or condition, games of chance − with ludicrously trifling stakes − possess a wild fascination for him. Every California town has its Chinese quarter ; every Chinese quarter abounds in gambling-houses. On the subject of opium, too, the variance between his theory and his practice reveals the human nature strong within him. Opiumsmoking, he invariably avers, is bad, very bad; and yet, six out of every seven idlers whom one meets on an evening walk through the Chinese quarter bear indelible evidence of the habit written on their jaded, ghastly faces.

He is gregarious. He must have, not one, but several friends, to whom to whisper, “ Solitude is sweet.” No practicable pecuniary temptation will induce him to come to the Eastern States, unless half a dozen or a dozen of his comrades are to accompany him and to live with him. He loves to dwell in towns. Even as a house-servant, he does not sleep under his master’s roof, if he can possibly avoid it, but goes to the Chinese quarter to spend every night with his comrades. He will work as late as he is wanted, however, without complaint, and he will be on hand at any required hour in the morning. He is a great night-bird, and his turn is convivial. He and his mates join in frequent little suppers, which they keep up until nearly daylight. The materials for these nocturnal banquets are believed to be contributed, unwittingly, by John’s employer, and brought away surreptitiously in John’s basket. His mistress often keeps her most valuable stores locked up, and issues only a week’s supply to him at a time ; but he is Frugality embodied, and can make gleanings enough for the midnight suppers, and sometimes, perhaps, for supplying himself with pocket-money besides.

Ask him why he will not lodge in his employer’s house, and he replies that he and his friends like to meet at night, and tell each other what they have learned during the day. It is doubtless their custom to instruct newly arrived servants in household matters. Just as he is going away at night, John will often question his mistress as to how she compounds a particular kind of cake, or accomplishes some other triumph of cookery ; and, in answer to her inquiring look, will explain that he wishes to tell a friend who has not been here long.

John prizes the pennies. An offer of half a dollar more per month may take him away from a household to which he seemed warmly attached. But his people are so numerous in California that it is easy to fill his place. Agents, or the Chinese Companies, on furnishing a servant, warrant him for one year, and, if he runs away or proves dishonest, send a substitute instead. Still, ladies who wish to avoid changes often keep John’s pay half a dollar or a dollar in arrears to make sure that he will not leave without fair notice. Girls in California, for general housework, receive, in gold, $ 20 per month and upward. Chinamen obtain about the same prices ; though some skilled cooks command from $25 to $40, and boys are hired as low as $ 10. Governor Blaisdel of Nevada tells me that he leaves his house for weeks and sometimes for months in the sole charge of his Chinese steward, without the least apprehension. Such trust is not uncommon, though of course it is sometimes abused. A firm in San Francisco lately found that a Chinaman, who had been with them for years and was trusted as fully as the partners themselves, had stolen several thousand dollars’ worth of goods little by little. Still, on the whole, the Chinese compare favorably in point of honesty with house-servants of any other nationality obtainable in America. In general morality they seem to be superior to every other class of masculine servants. Some ladies fear to trust them with their little daughters ; yet, with their almost universal employment, I have only heard of a single instance in which any impropriety was attempted by them. In quietness, tractableness, teachableness, and imitativeness they are certainly unequalled.

Ford’s history of Illinois relates that in the early days of Galena the only question the settlers asked about a newcomer was, “ Will he steal ? ” If that could be answered in the negative, they regarded him as an eminently desirable acquisition, an eminently respectable man. John can stand the same test, his enemies to the contrary notwithstanding. Many of our Chinese immigrants came from the coast; their lives at home were chiefly spent on the water, and they belonged to the poorest, most ignorant and degraded class. Their treatment in California, too, has given them unusual provocations to crime ; and the cruel laws which forbid their testifying against white men in the courts have greatly aggravated the disadvantage at which their ignorance of our language alone would be sufficient to place them. Some of them now confined in the California and Nevada penitentiaries are believed to be wholly innocent of the offences for which they were sentenced. And yet, notwithstanding all these drawbacks, the public records of both States show that the percentage of Chinamen convicted of crime is much smaller than that of foreigners in general, and but a trifle larger than that of our native-born population. Furthermore, the Six Companies, to some one of which John always belongs, exercise such paternal care that no Chinese beggar is ever seen in the streets of San Francisco, and no Chinese patient in the public hospitals. And the first Chinaman unable to read his own language has yet to make his appearance in California !

John has the true Oriental tendency to mysticism, and the Oriental vein of poetry cropping out in the most prosaic places. At home he has proverbs and exhortations to virtue written on his tea-cups, fans, chairs, and the walls of his inns. In San Francisco his sign-board literature is a study. “Virtue and felicity,” “Sincerity and faith,” are common inscriptions over his shop-doors. A recent writer in “ The Overland Monthly ” introduces us to a meat-market bearing the label “Virtue abounding”; a drug-store named “ Benevolence-and-Longevity-Hall,” and a restaurant styled “The Garden of the Golden Valley.”

He is quick and eager to learn. He reckons nimbly and accurately, not with the pencil and paper, but with marbles strung upon wires, as in the abacus used for teaching arithmetic to young learners. He does not readily catch our idioms or pronunciations, but soon learns to make himself intelligible in his jaw-wrenching pigeon-English,−“Me washe belly [very] muchee.” He shows the same hunger for knowledge which was such a marked and touching trait in the contrabands during the war. Wherever night and Sunday schools are established for teaching him English, he is prompt to attend. A Sacramento lady of my acquaintance has been compelled at different times to discharge two young Chinese servants, solely because, the moment her back was turned, they would devote themselves to the spelling-book, to the neglect of the wash-tub.

How do we treat him? Outrageously. So long as he stays at home we send missionaries to convert him ; but when he throws himself upon our hospitality, we meet him with cruelty and oppression. And even while doing this we have been building chapels for him, and making incoherent attempts to Christianize him. What a fascinating idea of the Christian religion our laws and practice, until very recently, must have given him ! We do our best to make the witty proverb of his native country true here, at least in its application to him: “The temples are kept open, but they are always empty ; the prisons are locked, but they are always full.” In California, as elsewhere, nine people out of ten mean to be just and considerate ; the trouble is in leaving John at the mercy of the brutal and cowardly tenth. One hears sickening stories of this everywhere. Even boys in the streets take the cue, and kick and cuff the little Yellowfaces. When a new cargo of Chinamen arrives, there is a strong disposition to mob them ; and the police of San Francisco, in bad emulation of the police of New Orleans in the negro massacre of 1866, have aided and participated in the diabolical work. John’s advance into each new pursuit has been resisted, step by step, with assault, riot, arson, and murder. Not only have factories been destroyed for giving him employment, but school-houses and churches have actually been burned because they afforded him opportunity for learning to read.

The excuse urged for excluding his testimony from the courts is, that he is an untrustworthy witness, and has no idea of the solemnity of an oath. This is unworthy of the nineteenth century. The tendency, more and more, the world over, is to lot anybody, even an interested party, without regard to his religious belief or his character, go upon the witness-stand and tell his story, leaving the jurors to judge of its credibility. But as the laws now stand, any ruffian may shoot down one Chinaman in cold blood, in the presence of a thousand others, and if no white man witnesses the crime the assassin will go scot-free, so far as the courts are concerned. This is a burning shame to California,− a State generally characterized by love of justice and fair play, − and especially to the Republican party, which has controlled it for so many years. But a portion of the press begins to assail the abuse with denunciation and satire, and to give voice and impetus to a more worthy and generous public opinion. And the leading citizens of San Francisco are affording a fresh example of their readiness to go outside of the law to reform intolerable abuses, and are intimating their willingness to visit sharp and memorable punishment upon brutal officers and corrupt judges, − a course into which the people of New York City will be goaded sooner or later. They have formed a Chinese Protective Association, with officers who make it their business to shield new-comers from ruffianism, and to see that every outrage upon a Chinaman is promptly and vigorously prosecuted. Now, when a mail-steamer from China arrives, the municipal authorities, shamed or terrified into doing their duty by the knowledge that the vigilant eye of this Association is upon them, station files of specially-instructed policemen along the street; and John, with his earthly effects neatly wrapped in two bundles which are suspended from the ends of a pole borne on his shoulder, steps lightly ashore, sure of protection, and looking as tidy and shining as a newly painted house after a rain.

Religion, too, has made the discovery that the Greeks are at our doors, and is taking them in hand very practically and efficiently. The leading churches of San Francisco, of the various denominations, have established Chinese Sunday-schools, which open every Sunday at noon and continue in session for two hours. Woman, of course, takes the brunt of this, as of most good works. A large proportion of the teachers are young girls and young married women. Blackboards and simple atlases, the primer, the spelling-book, and the New Testament as a reading-book, are in use. Here, for the first time, John encounters woman in a higher character than that of a slave, and acquires for her a new and affectionate respect. After she has taught him one Sunday, he looks eagerly for her coming, and will not be put off with a stranger, even of the lordly sex. A friend of mine, visiting one of these schools, found one hundred and seventy pupils present. He was given a class of two, − the usual number. One was a Chinese youth who had arrived in this country only three days before, and had never seen an English book. In one hour by the watch, this lad learned the alphabet so perfectly that he could go through it glibly, either way, and could name any individual letter the moment the pencil pointed to it. The other had been here for six months, and could read a little. He spelled out slowly, “ The horse will kick the man,” but the meaning of the verb puzzled him, and he inquired: “ Kickee ? What kickee ? ” A gesture of the foot sent a smile of comprehension rippling over his face. My friend then showed him the picture of a boy kneeling at prayer, with eyes closed, and asked, “ What is the boy doing ? ” John’s only idea of prayer is that of a priest dropping a written petition into a furnace as if he were mailing a letter ; and this baffled him. He studied it long with a blank look ; but at last broke out with a chuckle of discovery, “Me tink he catchee fly !”

The special tax of from two dollars to five dollars per month exacted of John in the mines is an unqualified outrage. There is no adequate check upon the collectors, and they sometimes take it three or four times over. And, as if its authoritative imposition were not enough, reckless white miners, when hard up, go among the Chinamen, pretending to be officers, and demanding the money. If John demurs, they knock him down and take it. “ Collecting the tax ” is a polite phrase for robbing him. United States Marshal Moulton of Idaho has very properly enjoined the officers of that Territory from collecting this tax, though the customary threats of violence were used to intimidate him. The ground of his action is the unquestionably correct one, that it is in violation of the Constitution of the United States ; and it will be tested before the Supreme Court if the local authorities persist. Equally unjust, if not equally illegal, is the fee of five dollars which the State of California collects from every arriving Chinaman, ostensibly for the support of hospitals, though, as we have seen, the hospitals are of no benefit to him.

Everywhere upon the Pacific slope John encounters the same disabilities as in California, in greater or less degree. Everywhere the laws discriminate against him, until he reaches Montana, upon waters flowing to the Atlantic. In that fair young Territory he first finds himself the peer of the native-born or the adopted citizen. There he already musters a thousand strong. Erelong the stream will pour down the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains, and spread through the Mississippi Valley, and overflow toward the Atlantic coast.

What shall we do with him? This is the sphinx-riddle which we must solve if we would not be eaten. It concerns also his half-brother, the “Jap.” The old restriction against emigration has been removed in Japan as well as in China. While I was in California last June, fifty Japanese families arrived to settle in one colony, and engage in silk and tea culture ; and a Pacific Mail steamer found two hundred and fifty Japanese at Yokohama, waiting to embark for San Francisco, but was unable to take them, as she was already loaded down with twelve hundred Chinamen.

The problem is too large and serious to dogmatize upon. The significant fact about John, after his numerical strength, is, that he never lets go. There are Yankees, it is said, so thrifty and tenacious that they would take root and grow upon a marble slab. The same is true of this strange yellow man. We may extort tribute from him, and revile him, and smite him on both cheeks ; but wherever his feet are once planted, there he stays. Into every industry he slowly works his way. In persistence, thoroughness, and precision, he is more than a match for us. Put him in a factory, and he works as systematically as the looms and spindles, every day in the year. lie is a one-day clock, and when the dollar has wound him up he keeps perfect time. But it is only the time of the machine. He reads literally the old saw ; we render it, “Whatever man has not done, man may do.” He will stand beside the loom from childhood to old age, but his ears will never catch any whispered hint from its buzzing lips how to make it do its work quicker or better. Therein seems to lie our chief advantage over him. There are exceptional cases,− a Chinese servant in San Francisco lately assisted his mistress to perfect a great improvement in the sewing-machine, by which the needle can be threaded while running at full speed, -−but in general John’s ingenuity is imitative, not inventive.

Still he is an appalling problem. He has no radical objection to menial pursuits, but it is folly to expect that he will be permanently confined to them. He will swarm in all the avenues of our industrial life. California to-day is a faint prophecy of the whole country a few years hence. One cannot descend the broad stairway of the Lick House, or walk Montgomery Street, or enter a store or a factory, or penetrate the remotest mining-camp of the mountains, or land from steamboat or railway-train, but right at one’s elbow stands like a fate this silent man, in his basket hat, blue tunic, and cloth shoes with wooden soles, − this man of the long pigtail and bare neck, the restrained, eager eyes, and the yellow, serene, impassive face.

The only public appeal for justice to him which I heard in California came from an unexpected source. One evening I went to the Metropolitan Theatre to hear George Francis Train on Things in General. It was his twenty-second lecture, but the house was full. (I wonder how many men there are in America − not “ fools ” or “ buffoons ” − who, merely as lecturers, can crowd the largest theatre in a metropolitan city every night for four weeks !) Train − the excitement of the hour − was anathematizing the British Lion, urging the substitution of greenbacks for specie, denouncing the Bank of California,− the overshadowing money-power of the coast, − burlesquing some pet pretensions of the Golden State, and satirizing the local newspapers, with his usual queer dovetailing of shrewd sense and wild extravagance.

The audience was a peculiar one. Three fourths of the people, perhaps, were Irish, − many of them raw and ignorant, − and the other one fourth the most thoughtful and cultivated men and women of the city, who had gone to study the speaker as an intellectual phenomenon. Train appeared in his familiar white kids and blue dress-coat with brass buttons. He began with the usual announcement that he was on his way to the White House (does he really believe it?), and certain to arrive there in the year of grace 1872. At hand stood his favorite blackboard, upon which he illustrated everything with fearful and wonderful diagrams. He spoke for two hours and a half. The phrase, “ as good as a play,” would fall far short of describing the performance. I was never present at any entertainment so interesting and exciting. I never saw any man hold an audience so perfectly, or handle it with so little apparent effort. His rambling, free-and-easy talk contained many time-honored jokes, some outbursts of impassioned rhetoric, and a good deal of spontaneous wit. The audience acted promptly upon his invitation to ask questions or reply to any of his points, and in every case he had a ready and ingenious answer.

But when he came to the Chinese question, he was on dangerous ground with three fourths of his hearers. Five minutes’ talk from him, in the wrong direction, would have stimulated those Irishmen into an armed attack upon the Chinese quarter, and the bloodiest riot ever seen in the United States. But he took a high, manly stand, defending the Chinese, and denouncing vehemently the wrongs and outrages to which they are subjected. This kindled the fiercest excitement; the audience would not have borne it from any one else than the great apostle of Fenianism. As it was, we seemed to be two or three times on the perilous point of transformation into a maddened and bloodthirsty mob. There were amusing episodes, but the hearers were too much wrought up to appreciate them. Once, while speaking very fast, Train said: “It is useless to talk of keeping the Chinamen away. Here they are ! Twelve hundred arrived this very afternoon upon a single ship. You can’t send them back. Will you shoot them ? What will you do with them ? ” “Vaccinate them ! ” shouted a wag from one of the galleries ; a witticism which was altogether lost upon the heated crowd, but which I here record to show that good seed is never wasted.

At last Train, warm with his subject, and fairly angered by the hootings of dissent, exclaimed, with great emphasis, while the house was so still that a pin might have been heard to drop : “ I don’t care whether you like it or not, I am for the Chinese. I am in favor of inviting them here; I am in favor of protecting them when they get here ; I am in favor of giving them the ballot ! ” When the storm of hisses had lulled, he continued : “ Look here, Irishmen of San Francisco. See how you are destroying all the power of your friends by this wretched bigotry ! Do you want to rekindle the old KnowNothing spirit ? You came to this country. You accepted its hospitalities. Whatever you are, it has made you. Is there any Irishman in this house so narrow, so mean, so utterly contemptible, that he would deny to any other man seeking our shores the same welcome, the same opportunities which he has enjoyed? If so, let him stand forth ; we all want to see his face ! ”

No one had the hardihood to stand up on this invitation. But the auditors did not at any time applaud the suggestion that we should give John the ballot. To every other plea of Train’s, after some mitigating hisses, they were beguiled into expressing their approbation. How quickly men answer appeals to their better nature ! Many of those upturned faces bore lines of ignorance, prejudice, brutality ; but their owners responded promptly to almost every invocation of their manlier instincts. And in talking thus to them and to Irishmen all over the Pacific coast, Train did a praiseworthy and invaluable work.

The general problem as to how we should deal with this Coming Man is California’s to-day, but it will be ours to-morrow. Its full solution we can reach only through the slow teachings of experience. But is there any American with so little faith in himself and his stock as to fear competition, on his own soil, with another man of another race ? If there is, as Train adjures his Fenians, let him stand up so that we can all see his face ! The English in India are but a handful, and yet they rule. The whites in our own Territory of New Mexico are a very small percentage of the voters, but they dictate the laws.

The only safe principle unquestionably is, to give John a fair chance. To this end are offered a few suggestions, which are based upon observation necessarily brief and superficial, but are yet specific enough for consideration and discussion.

I. Remove the Chinaman’s disability to testify in the courts, and throw around him the full protection of the civil law.

II. Encourage him to bring his women. No body of men permanently separated from their families can retain their moral or physical health. All our new Territories, from California to Wyoming, have shown what a wretched condition of society that is in which there are few women and children. They have shown, too, the pernicious effect of men’s going to a new country with the expectation, not of staying, but of accumulating a competence, and then returning home to enjoy it. Thus far the Chinese women are to the men only as one to twenty; and until lately, even these have been nearly all professional prostitutes. Of late, too, we have seen whole cargoes of young girls from China imported by men who, a generation earlier, would have been in the African slave-trade. Upon reaching San Francisco, they have commanded a premium of so much a head; and so eager has been the strife for them that it has kindled wide-spread and bloody riots. Ultimately, many of them are honorably married ; but the shameful and humiliating scenes which have attended their arrival, and which none deprecate more earnestly than the better classes of their own countrymen, can be prevented only by encouraging the general immigration of Chinese wives and children.

Now, John seldom or never comes expecting to stay. He proposes to accumulate two hundred or three hundred dollars, − sums which in his eyes constitute wealth, − and then to return home. It is a fundamental point in his religion to worship his dead ancestors, and to hold sacred every particle of their dust. As authentic history of them is supposed to run back for more than five thousand years, this necessarily includes the entire soil of the Chinese Empire. And John’s radical and hitherto insuperable objection to the introduction of railways at home is that they would disturb this hallowed dust. He brings to California a pious horror of having his bones rest anywhere save with the bones of his fathers ; and when he dies on our soil his remains (sometimes his embalmed body, but usually his bones, boiled, and stripped of flesh, that they may be packed compactly in boxes, to reduce the cost of transportation) are always sent home, five thousand miles, for burial, by the company to which he belongs. This leaves him essentially an alien, − among us but not of us. Should this continue ? Do we want an element which will soon be millions strong, without one interest or feeling in common with ours? Our only safety with John is, to assimilate him, to Americanize him. Induce him to bring his family, and he will outgrow the old superstition about burials ; he will take root, and will have no interest that is not identical with ours.

III. Educate his children. This, the most important point of all, is receiving the least attention. Few as the Chinese women now are, Chinese children, with their bright eyes and their notably “cunning” faces, begin to be seen on the streets of every California town. Whether the adults will Americanize, may be a question ; but these boys and girls are American by right of birth. Let us see to it that they are educated in free schools and in the English language. With other newcomers we have pursued this policy so Successfully that our trouble has always been confined to the first generation ; and that trouble we have long ago accepted as more than counterbalanced by corresponding advantages.

IV. Let us not be frightened at the thought of giving John the suffrage. It is that alone which staggers many liberal and thoughtful Californians. They urge : “ The Chinese are like no other immigrants. They appear among us as masses, not as individuals. As the manufacturer or contractor can now hire ten thousand of them from one firm, and pay for their monthly labor with one check, so the political candidate or executive committee could buyten thousand votes at a single transaction and in open market.” If John held the franchise to-day, perhaps this might be true. But as yet he does not wish to vote ; he never seeks to be naturalized ; and the question is merely one of a remote future. Why imitate Mrs. Toodles, and provide a doorplate for the conjectural husband of the hypothetical daughter ? If John never wants the suffrage, he will never have it. If a time comes when he does want it, the chances are that he will have risen to fitness for it. Nearly all experience teaches that whenever any class are persistently eager for the voting-privilege, they are competent to exercise it. Children of a larger growth, like our prattling little ones, are wont to prove equal to each new responsibility that is placed upon them. Witness the enfranchised negroes. In spite of the Cassandra prophecies that were dinned in our ears, are they not, on the whole, using the franchise as discriminatingly and uncorruptly as the rest of us ? Even if this case proves exceptional, and practical difficulty arises, will not the fortymillions of us have strength enough and wit enough to provide some practical remedy ?

The most touching story ever told of Abraham Lincoln relates how, a few months after his death, negroes in Cuba, recently kidnapped from Africa and unable to speak either English or Spanish, were found wearing photographs of the dead President upon their bosoms. They worshipped his memory, they held the confident belief that he would, erelong, rise from the dead, and come to free them. In some sense, the weary and the troubled of every European nation cherish the same ideal of the United States. Shall we not extend it to the swarming Orient ? Let us teach the poorest and humblest man in that cradle and hive of the race likewise to regard our soil as a waiting refuge, and our flag as a talisman which, the moment his feet are planted under it, will send all his burdens of slavery and caste and want crumbling to the ground, as the load of sin rolled from the shoulders of Christian when first he stood before the cross.

If the sharp experiences of the war have taught us anything, it is that democratic institutions, based upon free schools and free suffrage, can stand any strain. Edmund Quincy, after hinting at the high ability, character, and culture of the old Federalists, adds, in a remark of profound truth and significance : “It was their little faith in ideas that caused their disappearance from the world of American politics ; and it was his unbounded faith in ideas that gave to Thomas Jefferson, in spite of all his faults of character, and his inconsistencies, and errors of public conduct, that controlling power over the minds of men which has not died with him, but is giving direction and shape to the history, not only of his own country, but of all Christendom.”

Let us have faith in ideas, in human nature, and in the American system.