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and the supremacy of His law in civil affairs. In all the inaugural addresses of our Presidents, save one, there is an acknowledgment of the responsibility of all nations in general, and of ours in particular, to the Governor among the nations. Our chaplaincies in army and navy, in congressional and legislative halls, the Bible in the public schools, the oath in courts of justice, the oath of office, the Sabbath laws, the laws against blasphemy, the laws guarding Christian marriage, etc., all point to this one fact—that this is a Christian nation.

What is the voice of Christianity on the immigration question? It is this: All men who may choose should be allowed to come here without let or hindrance, so long as they conform to our Christian civilization. Take the Chinese as an illustration:

It is absurd. But

The Chinamen are God's creatures, and, as such, have a right to go where they may choose upon God's earth; for "the earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof." America does not belong to us. It belongs to God; and the Chinamen are just as much God's creatures as Americans, and have the same inalienable right to dwell here that we have. What right have the immigrants of 1620 to say to the immigrants of 1887, "You shall not come."' they have no right to bring their idols here, or to pursue their idolatrous customs. That is a violation of the Divine Law. And our Government was derelict in her duty when she allowed them to bring their idols to San Francisco, and set up their joss-houses there, and follow their heathenish practices, until a portion of that city became absolutely leprous; and there was a show of reason in the hoodlum cry that was raised, "The Chinese must go." That cry came rolling over the Rocky Mountains, and over the Allegheny Mountains, and struck the Capitol here at Washington, and both Houses responded in that infamous Anti-Chinese bill. What does

the bill say

? "No Chinaman shall come to America, to work, for ten years." 1. No Chinaman shall come. We have them here from France, Germany, Spain, Russia, Italy and Turkey. them here from England, Scotland and Wales.

We have Why, we even

"How has the

have a few here from Ireland. But the patient, industrious, frugal, innocent, harmless Chinaman may not come. fine gold become dim!"

2. No Chinaman shall come to work.

He can come for pleasure, for diplomatic purposes, to gamble or steal, but he may not come to work. We do not hesitate to denominate that bill anti-American, anti-humane, and anti-Chris

tian. In adopting it we were sowing to the winds, and now we have been called to reap the whirlwind in the horrible massacre at Rock Springs, Wyoming, and in the riots against the Chinamen yonder on the Pacific slope. God has decreed it-that which a man sows, that shall he also reap; and this is true of nations. Burke once said, in the English Parliament, "Except you guard the rights of the humblest serf that walks your shores, you cannot preserve the rights of England's proudest peer"-a sentence which always thrills me when I think of it. We tried the experiment of trampling on the black man's rights, and in 1861 God came to make inquisition; and the price demanded was $9,000,000,000 and 1,000,000 precious lives, North and South, and a train of suffering and sorrow which reaches even to the present hour. As if forgetful of that lesson, we are now trampling upon the rights of the yellow man. And, by and by, God will come a second time for retribution. Let us remember, the second visit will be more severe than the first. The Chinamen, as God's creatures, have a right to come to God's America. They have no right to bring their idols or idolatrous customs here. That is a violation of the law of God. The State should prohibit the second; it should, in no wise, interfere with the first. And so that Christian principle, an essential element in our national life, settles the vexed anti-Chinese question. That Christian principle will settle every department of the immigration question. This nation began with immigration. It has become a great power by immigration. It will have a glorious future by immigration. Let God's law prevail !

THE MISUSE OF WEALTH.

BY MERRILL E. GATES, LL. D.

PRESIDENT OF RUTGERS COLLEGE.

WEALTH IS POWER. IT IS A SOCIAL FORCE.

Wealth is power. It is labor stored up in portable form. It is a charged battery of social force, which may be discharged again as motor-power when the owner will. It gives to its possessor his option among many possible lines of effort, in any of which it will further his ends. For wealth is "power to command, in exchange for itself, the labor or the products of labor of others."

Wealth is pre-eminently a social force. We have met in this Conference to study "social problems "--the study which has engrossed the best thought of the last century. Social problems have their conditions fixed by the interplay of social forces. And among social forces, wealth has a pre-eminent interest for us, because it is the meeting-place of labor and power. Into its producenters labor. In its use lies power. And most that concerns men in their social relations is intimately connected with labor and power.

tion

Wealth cannot be so defined as not to carry in the definition suggestions of a scope vastly wider than selfish personal gratifications. The far-reaching power of wealth for good and for evil becomes more and more evident, as society becomes more complex. If wealth confers on a man the power to command the labor of other men, we find ourselves at once using terms so full of import that no one year, no one generation alone, can show their full meaning. When we speak of power in one person to command the fruits of other men's labor; when we deal with the responsibilities and the rights which belong to labor and to social power--we are using terms which history has freighted with significance.

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY SAYS TO THE TWENTIETH, “ALL MEN MUST LABOR."

The centuries have their great sub-tones, the diapason-note which one sounds out to another. As the eighteenth century went out in revolution and blood, it said to the nineteenth, "All men shall share in political power. All men shall govern." Round this doctrine the nineteenth century has shaped itself, with its abolition of human slavery, and its popular forms of government. The sovereignty of the people under God is the significance of our century. Before its resistless power, traditional and hereditary privileges of princes and nobility have steadily fallen away. And now, as its closing decade draws on, the nineteenth century sounds out as a key-note to the twentieth: "Now that all men govern, all men must be laborers, too. If all are to govern, all must serve. Fitness for sovereignty is proved only by ability to serve all!"

This is the emphasized utterance of our time. Before it, the last stronghold of selfish privilege, the plea of wealth that it can exempt its owners from God's universal law of unselfish service, the demand of wealth to be allowed in peace to blind its eyes to its own responsibilities, is to disappear before the law that each man is bound usefully to serve all.

It is a fine old legend, "Noblesse oblige;" noble blood binds one to noble service. Just so the noblest men of wealth of our time are beginning-only beginning-to awaken to the power of the legend "Richesse oblige." They are beginning to recognize the truth that wealth lays the heaviest possible obligation on its owner, to make his unselfish service of the highest welfare of his fellowmen reach out as widely as his wealth can extend that service. This means that men can no longer be left, unquestioned, to use their wealth, be it great or small, merely for their own selfish gratification. It means that the unvarying law of God which attaches an obligation to every opportunity, and places a duty over against every right, makes no exception of wealth, with its vast powers of service. "With new ability; new responsibility." Wealth is power; and for the unselfish use of all his powers, every man must give an account to the God who has taught us that "no man liveth to himself alone."

POWER MAY BE MISUSED.

Wealth is power. Always power carries with it a possibility of

its misuse. As a nation we have been told for the last half century that we were going to be very rich. Each succeeding census has surprised us with its statistics of our wealth. To-day, we are the richest nation in the world. The figures appall us. Over $50,000,000,000, with a daily increase in wealth of more than $6,000,000! Never were we so rich as we are to-day. And yet there are grave doubts, on all sides, as to whether we are gaining ground, socially, politically, morally, in these prosperous years. It is not long since a keenly observant (if not complimentary) visitor to America told us, in the chastely severe dialect of his native island, that we were "too beastly prosperous!" We understood him without difficulty! And in our hearts we knew that he told us a truth! We have ceased to feel unqualified pride in this abounding wealth. We ask ourselves whether industry in money-getting alone will save a nation. There is a suspicion abroad among us that, while intent upon what we have called "enlightened selfinterest," as a people we have lost sight of a host of shining virtues. A prosperous commonwealth is not insured by the material prosperity which makes wealth common.

WEALTH IS MISUSED WHEN IT IS USED MERELY TO GET MORE

WEALTH.

When power is used only that the man who wields it may get for himself more power, there is danger. To devise checks upon power, to restrain its tendency to beget more power, is a large part of the work of the Science of Politics. Wealth is power. And the deepest-seated danger in its use is the tendency to regard it as in itself an end, not as a means for obtaining nobler ends.

The most dangerous misuse of wealth is, using it merely to get more wealth. A tendency to this misuse is involved in the very nature of the process of wealth-winning. It finds expression in maxims like this, "Let all your spending be for tools of your trade." The steady purpose of the devotees of wealth-winning is to get more power without reference to any right use of that power. In this grim determination to get more wealth at any cost, the man moves and lives and has his being. This is that "pleonexia," that covetous “I will have more," which God has expressly called "idolatry." Wealth is put openly and prominently in the place of God. "Of money, and through money, and to money are all things my life, and to money be the glory," is the faith that is in such

in

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