In regard to the process of converting and Christianizing this people, a missionary who has been in the field since 1849, testifies that not one in a thousand has even nominally professed a change from heathenism, and that of this small number nearly one-half has been taught in missionary schools in China. The same missionary says, "as they come in still larger numbers they will more effectually support each other in their national peculiarities and vices, become still more confirmed in heathen immoralities, with an influence in every respect incalculably bad." Under what possible sense of duty any American can feel that he promotes Christianity by the process of handing California over to heathenism, is more than I am able to discover.

In a

This question connects itself intimately and inseparably with the labor question. Immigration of the Chinese is encouraged by some openly, by many secretly, because their labor is cheap. The experiment is a most dangerous one. Republic where the man who works carries a ballot in his hands, it will not do for capitalized wealth to legislate for cheap labor. We do not want cheap labor: we do not want dear labor. We want labor at fair rates, at rates that shall give the laborer his fair share, and capital its fair share. If more is sought by capital, less will in the end be realized. There is not a laboring-man from the Penobscot to the Sacramento who would not feel aggrieved, outraged, burdened, crushed, by being forced into competition with the labor and the wages of the Chinese cooly. For one, I will never consent by my vote or my voice to drive the intelligent workingmen of America to that competition and that degradation. Mr. Garrison spent the best years of an honored life in a courageous battle for the freedom and dignity of labor, and for its emancipation from thraldom. I trust he will not lessen the gratitude which the workingmen of America owe him for his noble lead in the past by an effort now to consign them to the humiliation and the poverty inevitably resulting from the competition of Chinese coolies.

Years ago, Mr. Carlyle said to an American friend, "You will have no trouble in your country so long as you have few people and much land; but when you have much people and little

land, your trials will begin." No one connected in any manner with the government of the Republic can view the situation without grave concern. At least nine large States of the South are disturbed by a race trouble, of which no man is yet wise enough to see the end; the central and largest and wealthiest of our Territories is seized by a polygamous population which flaunts defiance in the face of the General Government: discontent among unemployed thousands has already manifested a spirit of violence, and but recently arrested travel between the Atlantic and the Mississippi by armed mobs which defied three States and commanded great trunk-lines of railway to cease operations. Practical statesmanship would suggest that the Government of the United States should avoid the increase of race troubles, and that nothing but sheer recklessness will force upon the American population of the Pacific slope the odious contamination of the lowest grade of the Chinese race. It may be attempted; but, in my judgment, it will lead to direful results, in which violence and murders and massacres will be terribly frequent. Let it be proclaimed here and now that the General Government will maintain unrestricted immigration of Chinese coolies, and in less than five years a larger military force than the existing Army of the United States will be required to keep peace on the Pacific slope. I feel that I am pleading the cause of the free American laborer, and of his children and of his children's children - the cause in short of "the house against the hovel; of the comforts of the freeman against the squalor of the slave."

FALSE ISSUE RAISED BY THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY.

[On the 25th of February, 1865, Congress, largely Republican in both branches, enacted the following Law which was approved by President Lincoln.

"No military or naval officer, or other person engaged in the civil, military or naval service of the United States, shall order, bring, keep or have under his authority or control, any troops or armed men at the place where any general or special election is held in any State, unless it be necessary to repel the armed enemies of the United States, or to keep the peace at the polls." Since the revision of the United States Statutes this law has been known as Section 2002.

Under this power" to keep the peace at the polls" Southern elections during the reconstruction period were fairly regular and honest. The Democratic party made the repeal of the law an issue and agitated it for years, creating the popular impression that the Republican National Administration kept large bodies of troops in the South to control elections. In the Forty-sixth Congress both Senate and House were under the control of the Democratic party. The part of the law offensive to the Democratic party was contained in the closing words which are Italicized above. Instead of striking those words out, the Democratic caucus of Senators and Representatives resolved to re-enact Section 2002 word for word with the exception of the Italicized words at the end. The caucus also determined to put the amendment on the Army Appropriation Bill and to make the passage of the Bill dependent on the President's approving it with the Amendment. Mr. Blaine delivered the following speech on the bill in the Senate of the United States on the 14th of April, 1879.]

MR. PRESIDENT, The existing section of the Revised Statutes numbered 2002 reads thus:

"No military or naval officer, or other person engaged in the civil, military or naval service of the United States, shall order, bring, keep or have under his authority or control, any troops or armed men at the place where any general or special election is held in any State, unless it be necessary to repel the armed enemies of the United States, or to keep the peace at the polls."

The object of the proposed section, which has just been read at the clerk's desk, is to get rid of the eight closing words, namely, "or to keep the peace at the polls." The mode of legislation proposed in the army bill now before the Senate is

therefore an unusual mode. It is an extraordinary mode. If it be desired to repeal a single sentence at the end of a section in the Revised Statutes the ordinary way is to strike off those words, but the mode chosen in this bill is to repeat and re-enact the whole section, leaving those few words out. While I do not wish to be needlessly suspicious on a small point, I am quite persuaded that this did not happen by accident. It came by design. If I may so speak, it came of cunning, the intent being to create the impression that the Republicans in the administration of the General Government had been using troops right and left, hither and thither, in every direction, and that the Democrats as soon as they came into power enacted this section. I can imagine Democratic candidates for Congress in the next campaign all over the country reading this section to gaping audiences as one of the first offsprings of Democratic reform, whereas every word of it, every syllable of it, from its first to its last, is the enactment of a Republican Congress.

I repeat that this unusual form presents a dishonest issue, whether so intended or not. It aims to make it appear that as soon as the Democrats got possession of the Federal Government they proceeded to enact the clause which is thus expressed. The law was passed by a Republican Congress in February, 1865. There were forty-six senators sitting in this Chamber at the time, of whom only ten or at most eleven were Democrats. The House of Representatives was overwhelmingly Republican. We were in the midst of a war. The Republican administration had a million or possibly twelve hundred thousand bayonets at its command. Thus situated, with the amplest possible power to interfere with elections had they so designed, with soldiers in every hamlet and county of the United States, the Republican party themselves placed that provision on the statute-book, and Abraham Lincoln signed it.

I beg you to observe, Mr. President, that this is the first instance in the legislation of the United States in which any restrictive provision whatever was enacted in regard to the use of troops at the polls. The Republican party did it with the Senate and the House in their control. Abraham Lincoln signed it when he was Commander-in-Chief of an army larger than

ever Napoleon Bonaparte had at his command. So much by way of correcting an ingenious and studied attempt at misrepresentation.

The alleged object is to strike out the few words that authorize the use of troops "to keep peace at the polls." This country has been alarmed, perhaps I would better say amused, at the great effort made to create an impression that the Republican party relies for its popular strength upon the use of the bayonet. This Democratic Congress has attempted to give a bad name to this country throughout the civilized world, and to give it on a false issue false in whole and in detail, false in the charge, false in all the specifications. The impression sought to be created, as I say, not only throughout the North American Continent but in Europe to-day, is that elections, at least in the Southern States of the Union, are controlled by the bayonet.

I denounce it here as a false issue. I am not at liberty to say that any gentleman making the issue knows it to be false. I trust he does not. But I shall prove to him that it is false, and that it has not a solitary inch of solid ground to rest upon. I have in my hand an official transcript of the location and the number of all the troops of the United States east of Omaha. By "east of Omaha," I mean all the United States east of the Mississippi River together with the belt of States that border the Mississippi River on the west. They include forty-one millions at least of the forty-five millions of people that this country is supposed to contain to-day. In that magnificent area, I will not pretend to state its extent, but with forty-one million people, I know officially the exact number of troops. Would any senator on the opposite side hazard a guess as to that number? Would he like to state how many men with muskets in their hands there are in the vast area I have named? Let me tell him! There are two thousand seven hundred and ninety-seven! Not one more.

From the headwaters of the Mississippi River to the lakes, and down the great chain of lakes, and down the St. Lawrence, and down the valley of the St. John, and down the St. Croix, striking the Atlantic Ocean and following it down to Key West, around the Gulf, to the mouth of the Mississippi again, a frontier of eight thousand miles either bordering on the ocean