About China, as Relates to Itself and to Us

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ABOUT CHINA, AS RELATES TO ITSELF AND TO US.

The people of California and Oregon, in a way that will probably give the law to the whole of that Pacific empire of which they are a main part, have, by legislative enactment, decided on certain physiological purgings (if we may call them so,) that mark a new era in American Politics. We allude to the laws for the total prohibition of negroes from the vast extent of Oregon, and to the laws, lately passed in California, for the exclusion of the Chinese.

We had something to say, some time since, about the Oregon prohibition—and we now propose to give a statement of the California law, and reasons why.

Speaking of such reasons for Chinese exclusion from America, the San Francisco Bulletin says:

We do not want any more of these people here; and there is great danger, unless something be done to check the immigration, that the whole Pacific coast of America will be inundated by them. The Chinese empire differs from every other country on the globe. By its repressive policy, maintained for centuries, it has accumulated upon its vast area a population inconceivably dense. Industry and frugality, pushed to the utmost verge of human endurance, scarcely furnish her teeming millions with food to keep them alive. Every inch of soil has to produce its vegetation. No insect, or vermin, or reptile, is so loathsome but is consumed for food.

Year after year people die of starvation in greater numbers in China than would depopulate our State. Sunk into this terrible abyss of physical necessity and want, the moral character of the starving and degraded lower classes is described by recent travellers as being in keeping with their condition. Crimes to horrible to be mentioned in other lands, are there so common and open as not to excite remark. Centuries of idolatry and vice and bestiality have leprousied over their humanity until it is no longer visible. When among them, one doubts that they are men.

Though this is putting the case rather strong, there is foundation enough for it all. Bayard Taylor¹ says of the masses of China people, "Their touch is pollution—it is my deliberate opinion that they are morally the most debased people on the face of the earth."

The San Francisco print goes on to assert:

Unless some check be given to this Asiatic immigration, it is not altogether a wild speculation to think that these copper colored men may overwhelm the other races on this coast by their numbers—as limitless as were the frogs in Egypt. It is common for some men to affect not to be "afraid of the Chinamen." But we have read somewhere of a great army which was broken up and scatterred by myriads of the smallest but most disgusting of insects. Frogs, and locusts, and ants, have all, in the course of time, vanquished the richest countries. Why may not the Chinamen do the same, if they have the numbers?

For it is the opinion in California that plentiful as has been the immigration there from China, it is nothing to what is probably coming, unless prevented by positive laws of exclusion. The reader will understand that the Chinese already swarm in the Golden State, and are looked upon there with much contempt and aversion by the Americans.

It should be added to the above opinions of Bayard Taylor, and of the San Francisco print, that we, without doubt, see the very worst specimens of Chinese, here in America. The "fair Chinese," although numerous and mighty of course in their own land, seldom or never leave it for foreign countries. It is doubtful whether we have ever had a good specimen of them here.

Probably there is no subject more curious, and more enveloped in darkness, than China and the Chinese to-day. They are not that dirty and abominable race merely; that is but one of the facts to be told about them. We are to remember that they represent the most ancient forms of civilization, government, and religion, now in force, continued from far remote periods down to the present hour. They occupy a large share of the surface of the early and youthful earth—those regions whence the great historical mass migrations poured out, thousands of years ago, to make, through many and many a century, not only modern history, but much of ancient history.

We are also to remember that, while we write this, the population there in China comprises nearly four hundred millions of human beings—more than one third of all those existing upon the earth. And not this serious fact only is worthy of attention—the literature, manufactures, and all the reminiscences of China, are also worth serious attention.

But China, its government, its exculsiveness, &c., are soon and surely to break up—"the sick man" is going to die. What will come out of it all, no one can tell. New forms must arrange themselves—new growth and new governments. Doubtless a great deal is latent in China—has been repressed there too long.

From our American position on the shores of the Pacific, we cannot but look with deep interest on all these things, and carry out divers speculations upon them. All Asia, middle, nothern, and southern—All the countless islands of Polynesia between—are in time to be in more or less intimate connection with us.

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