Part 9

[It was anticipated up to a late day by the committee of arrangements that General Fisk would be present at the meeting and would make an address upon the Indian Report. In his unexpected and compelled absence he kindly sent the following letter:]

It is almost two hundred and fifty years since Captain John Mason, at the head of ninety men, more than half of the fighting force of the Connecticut Colony, marched against Sassacus, and almost within bow-shot of where your Annual Meeting is to be held, fought the Pequods. It was the first Indian war in New England. Thomas Hooker, “the light of the Western Churches,” famed as “a son of thunder,” delivered to Mason the staff of command. The very learned and godly Stone spent nearly the whole night in importunate prayer for success to crown the expedition, which on the morrow sailed past the Thames, hoping by strategy to reach the Pequod fort unobserved. Under cover of night, the soldiers of Connecticut made the attack upon the Indians. “We must burn them,” shouted Mason, who himself cast a firebrand to the windward among the light mats of their cabins. The helpless natives climbed the palisades as their blazing encampment assisted the English marksmen in taking good aim. Six hundred Indians, men, women and children, perished, most of them in the hideous conflagration. Capt. Miles Standish had twenty years earlier slaughtered Witawamo and others of the Massachusetts tribe, the knowledge of which, as it reached the gentle spirited Robinson in Leyden, caused the pastor to write to Bradford, “concerning the killing of those poor Indians, of which we heard at first by report and since by more certain relation. Oh, how happy a thing had it been if you had converted some before you killed any.”

“The principle and foundation of the charter of Massachusetts,” wrote Charles II. at a time when he had Clarendon for his adviser, “was the freedom of liberty and conscience, not only for the Puritan but for the natives, whom the ministers might win to the Christian faith.” The instructions to Endicott as to the rights of the Indians on the far-away Atlantic coast, and their duty to them, were clear and emphatic. “If any of the savages pretend right of inheritance to all or any part of the lands granted in our patent, endeavor to purchase their title, that we may avoid the least scruple of intrusion. Particularly publish that no wrong or injury be offered to the natives.” The colony seal was a wandering Indian with arrows in his right hand, with the motto, “Come and help me.” For more than two hundred and fifty years, from our Indian tribes, as they have been steadily driven before the surging tide of civilization from the Atlantic to the Pacific, has there been the constant cry of the weaker to the stronger forces of the continent, “come and help me.” Many who will be in attendance upon your Annual Meeting have seen “Standing Bear” of the Poncas, who was wantonly and wickedly driven from his home on the banks of the Missouri by the Government, and heard him tell his simple story of wrong endured, and heard his appeal, “Come and help me.” With sublime faith that God intended all men to be free and equal, all men without restriction, without qualification, without limit, let us listen to their appeal, and respond with the best help in our power to contribute.

Never before in the history of this country has there been such an awakening in behalf of the Indian. Never before such healthy sentiment for justice and fair play for the original owners of the soil over which our fifty millions of prosperous people unfurl the flag of the free. The Indian question, like the Ghost of Banquo, is at every banquet. It will not down until “Birnam wood do come to Dunsinane.” Hundreds of years of broken faith, during which ambuscades, massacres, fired Indian camps, blazing wigwams and smouldering embers of burned villages, have strewn the pathway of our march of empire, until now upon every lip is the interrogatory, What shall be done with the Indian? All the Indian asks, all his friends ask for him, is a _fair chance_.

It has been well said that in good faith and good feeling we must take up this work of Indian civilization, and at whatever cost do our whole duty in the premises. We owe them protection of the property they own, endowments of money, forbearance, patience, care, education, _citizenship_.

Let not another Indian be removed from his home, except as he removes himself by his own volition.

Let every acre of land now occupied under treaty, or by any other document by which the United States have “ceded and relinquished” the same, be held sacredly theirs forever, unless the citizen Indian chooses to sell it.

Let there be no more the policy of seclusion, but rather that of absorption.

Let all covenants between the Government and the Indian be executed as promptly and faithfully as with any other person.

Let the Indian citizen have his own home with all the protection of National and State Governments.

Let the Indian citizen have the same protection of law, and require from him the same obedience to law as governs in the case of the white man and the black man, and then the Indian will work out his own destiny.

Let us say with that quaint philosopher, Hosea Bigelow, that

“This is the one great American idee, To make a man _a man_, and then to let him be.”

Trusting that the American Missionary Association will keep its standard on the Indian question “full high and advancing,” I remain,

With very great respect, Your obedient servant,

CLINTON B. FISK.

* * * * *

THE CHINESE.

* * * * *

“CALIFORNIA CHINESE MISSION.”

Auxiliary to the American Missionary Association.

PRESIDENT: Rev. J. K. McLean, D.D. VICE-PRESIDENTS: Rev. A. L. Stone, D.D., Thomas C. Wedderspoon, Esq., Rev. T. K. Noble, Hon. F. F. Low, Rev. J. E. Dwinell, D.D., Hon. Samuel Cross, Rev. S. H. Willey, D.D., Edward P. Flint, Esq., Rev. J. W. Hough, D.D., Jacob S. Tabor, Esq.

DIRECTORS: Rev. George Mooar, D.D., Hon. E. D. Sawyer, Rev. E. P. Baker, James M. Haven, Esq., Rev. Joseph Rowell, Rev. John Kimball.

SECRETARY: Rev. W. C. Pond. TREASURER: E. Palache, Esq.

* * * * *

REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE.

Your Committee, to whom was referred that part of the Report of the Executive Committee which concerns the Chinese, beg leave to report as follows:

1. That in estimating the success of their work, the difficulties under which it has been prosecuted must be borne in mind; the fact that it has been carried on in the face of an intense hostility to the presence of Chinese upon our shores, extending not only to the lower classes, but also, in not a few localities, including influential clergymen and laymen, and became so far a dominant sentiment, that both the great political parties have yielded to it by inserting anti-Chinese planks in their platforms.

2. That this work ought to be not only generously supported and vigorously maintained, but, so far as practicable, extended, especially by the establishment of schools and mission work among the Chinese in the mines.

3. That while your Committee recognize the difficulties in the way of establishing a mission in China, they also see that there would be great advantage, both direct and indirect, in thus connecting a foreign with the home work, and they recommend the Board to give serious consideration to the proposition, and to carry it into execution, if, on a more thorough inquiry, it shall be found practicable to do so without interfering with the other work of the society, or with the work of other Evangelical missions in China.

LYMAN ABBOTT, _Chairman_.

* * * * *

THE TWO METHODS.

REV. LYMAN ABBOTT, D.D., NEW YORK.

* * * Let us recognize, then, that there is a possibility of danger to us, religious danger from the influx of a godless and atheistic people, political danger from the influx of a vast amount of cheap labor, danger from a deluge coming from an ocean almost unfathomable and immeasurable. How shall we meet that danger? Looking down the vista of the years, how shall we prepare ourselves for it and protect ourselves from it?

There are two methods; and I wish simply to set these two methods before you as clearly and as distinctly as I can.

The one method is that of self-protection by force; the method of building a Chinese wall and saying, “You shall not come upon our shores;” the method of the brick-bat; the method of the mob; the method which has been succinctly put in Dennis Kearney’s platform, “The Chinese must go,” and more genteelly and courteously put in the Democratic and Republican platforms, which mean the same thing; the method which declares, “We will not allow this people upon our shores to live among us, to work with us, to share our benefits;” the method of a prohibitory legislation.

In respect to that method, _first, we have no right to adopt it_. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.” Go through the first five books of the Bible and find how it is iterated and reiterated again and again, that the soil of this earth belongs to God. No people have a right to set themselves down upon a territory and say to their brother people, “You shall not come.” We have a right to say that if they come they shall come subordinate to the laws and the institutions that have been established here; that they shall behave themselves; that they shall obey the system of laws which we have found good for ourselves and for our children; but we have no right to build a wall of adamant around the land and say, “Keep out.” By what right do the children of the immigrants of 1620 say to the immigrants of 1880, “You shall not set foot upon this soil”? By what right do the sons of the Pilgrim Fathers say to the pilgrims of this generation, “You shall keep off”? When did that right come to us? Could we have said it in 1700, in 1750, in 1800? At what epoch in our national history accrued to us the right of drawing the line, building the wall, closing the gates, and saying, “Thou shalt come no more?”

I shall not enter in detail into the argument on this subject. I know what is the reply: “If I have a farm of a hundred acres, may I not keep tramps off?” No nation has found itself without difficulty and threatened danger, that has attempted to keep the laborer off of land which was not being worked. To-day Ireland is wrestling with the labor problem, and England is wrestling with the labor problem, because there are vast tracts of unoccupied, untilled, uncultivated land from which the laborer is excluded. So long as our mines lie undug; so long as our prairies lie uncultivated; so long as our streams run their course and no music of the mills sings along their lines, so long industry has a right to its home under our flag and within our borders.

And _we have not the power_ if we had the right. Congress does not make laws; Congress only declares and interprets them. There is but one law-giver—God Almighty; and all that judges and governors and law-makers and Congresses and Parliaments can do, is to ascertain what are God’s laws and interpret them. And God’s law is the law of liberty, and all His laws are to conserve liberty. Never in the history of the world has a nation succeeded in stopping one of these great migratory movements. Out of four hundred million people, in one year almost as many corpses lie upon the ground in China as were strewed on all our battle-fields, and over every one a grave-stone might be erected with the inscription, “Died of hunger!” Why, you might better expect to stop the charge of a herd of buffaloes rushing madly along with the prairie on fire behind them, by means of a Virginia rail fence, than to stop the immigration of a great nation, driven from its home by pursuing famine, with an act of Congress. You could easier dam up the waters of the Gulf Stream with bulrushes.

In the year 250 the Goths and Vandals won their first victory over Roman arms on the Roman boundary. The Roman empire adopted Dennis Kearney’s platform; it said, “We will not have the Goths and Vandals on our territory.” The Roman empire was clad in mail from its head to its foot; it was an army of soldiers; it put forth the greatest military power the world has seen to stop the great migration. For a hundred and fifty years the conflict went on, but year by year the valiant warrior was beaten back, and it was ended at last with the sack of Rome. But 250 years before these immigrants made their first appearance on the border line, a little decrepit Jew made his appearance in Rome as a prisoner. He lived there two years, bound, chained to the soldier that guarded him, and he brought there the story that God had shown himself in Jesus Christ, His Son, who had lived, suffered, died, risen, and ever lived for them. In those 250 years, Christianity under various persecutions, had grown little by little, until, when the Goths and Vandals made their appearance, it comprised one-twentieth of the population of Rome—fifty thousand out of a million. It sent Bishop Ulfilas with his Gothic Bible, to the north; it sent Augustine into England; it sent St. Patrick—Protestant before the time of Protestantism—to preach a pure gospel in Ireland. One and another and another went forth, bearing the cross; and when at last the Goths and Vandals had conquered the armed Romans, so thoroughly had that Christian church done its work, that, says Lecky, the Christian church conquered the barbarian world almost in the same hour in which the barbarian world conquered Rome.

We are told that we cannot convert the Chinese. Why, Christianity, while it was yet in its cradle, without churches, without schools, without a printing press, without literature, Christianity infantile vanquished the serpents that had strangled the military Hercules. If we cannot, with the Christianity that we possess to-day, vanquish the semi-civilized paganism of China, we had better get a new Christianity, for we sorely need it.

Let us look, then, at the other method of protecting our nation from the incursion of the Chinese. The one is the barbaric method, the method of military Rome; the other is the Christian method, the method of the successors and followers of the Apostles and of the Lord Jesus Christ. What is this method? What does it involve? It involves welcoming the Chinese to our shores; throwing open the gates; recognizing the truth that the earth is the Lord’s, and that all peoples are entitled to make their home here if they will; welcoming them to all the protection—I do not say to all the powers—of citizenship; holding over them the shield of the Declaration of Independence, and declaring for them the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” It involves bringing them into our schools and into our churches; teaching them that which we teach ourselves and our children; teaching them those things upon which our own intelligence and prosperity and our own national life are based. Above all, it involves teaching them those great principles of Christianity which are the very conservation of national force and the saviours of the nation. It involves teaching them that there is one God; that we are all one family, brethren in the Lord Jesus Christ, doubly brethren—born of God and redeemed by Christ; it involves teaching them immortality, and all the glorious hopes and liberations that come from the faith of immortality; it involves all the assimilating and unifying force and power that come from teaching the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of the human race.

And, observe, you cannot carry on these two methods simultaneously. You cannot say, “We will exclude the Chinese, but if they do come here we will convert them.” You cannot ask the Chinaman to kneel down with you and say, “Our Father which art in Heaven,” and then, when he has finished, take him by the throat and toss him into the Pacific. You cannot say to a Chinaman, “You are my brother, get out of here!” You cannot be both Christian and Pagan; you must take your choice.

It is said that the Chinese cannot be converted, that they are impervious to Christian influences, and that they repudiate and reject all such. What have been the Christian influences that have been showered upon them? They have been impervious to the guns of England when they flamed out, “You shall take opium!” they have been impervious to the influence of Dennis Kearney’s brick-bats when they have been flung at them in the street. I do not wonder that they were impervious to that kind of Christianity. Cannot be converted? Men call this an age of scepticism; but the unbelief that doubts the first chapter of Genesis, that thinks the story of the Fall is a parable, that is uncertain whether the whale did really swallow Jonah or not, that doubts whether those three men went into the fiery furnace unconsumed, is as nothing compared with the unbelief that lurks sometimes in our pulpits and oftener in our pews, that doubts the declaration that the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ is the power of God unto salvation to every man that believeth—not to every Anglo-Saxon man, not to every white man, not to every cultured man, but to every black man, and red-skinned man, and copper-colored man, and Indian man, and Chinaman,—to _humanity_. It is as nothing compared with the infidelity that puts under its foot the obligation: “I am debtor to the Jew, and to the Greek, to the bond and to the free, to the white, to the black, to the Indian, to _every_ man, because for every man my Christ died.”

We cannot convert the Chinese? Really it does not lie in us to say they are beyond hope. Let me read you the features of a portrait:

“Huge, white bodies, cool-blooded, with fierce blue eyes and reddish flaxen hair; ravenous stomachs, filled with meat and cheese, heated by strong drinks; of a cold temperament, slow to love, home stayers, prone to drunkenness! * * pirates at first; * * sea-faring, war, and pillage, their only idea of a freeman’s work; * * of all barbarians the strongest of body and heart, the most formidable, the most cruelly ferocious; * * torture and carnage, greed of danger, fury of destruction, obstinate and frenzied bravery of an over-strong temperament, the unchaining of the butcherly instincts; * * with a great and coarse appetite.”—[Compiled from Taine’s English Literature, vol. I pp. 30–33.] Do you recognize it? It is the portrait of your ancestors and mine; and if Christianity can make out of that picture such an audience as I see before me to-night, what may it not make out of China?

To-night again we see in the heavens, brighter and clearer by far than ever Constantine saw in his fabled vision, that flaming cross, and under it the motto, “By this sign I will conquer.” That motto, enforced by the history of eighteen centuries of triumph, I set before you; the Roman spear on the one hand and the flaming cross on the other: choose you by which sign you will vanquish the Chinese.

* * * * *

OUR GROUNDS OF ENCOURAGEMENT.

REV. SAMUEL SCOVILLE, STAMFORD, CONN.

[Mr. Scoville compared the work of the Association to the river which went out of Eden and became into four heads, the Pishon, flowing to the land of gold and the Havilah of the East, representing its Chinese work. After forcibly depicting the importance of the work as involving the regeneration of China, the good name of the Christian Church, the honor of Christ, and the perpetuity of our political institutions, the address closed with a statement of the grounds for encouragement that this work can and shall be done. It is this latter part only for which we have room, as follows]:—

I turn now to the grounds we have for encouragement that this work can and shall be done.

1. The first is found in God’s word. We ask ourselves, Is it His purpose that this work shall be done, that those heathen on our Western coast and in China shall be converted, or must they be given over to destruction? And we read the promise of God to His dear Son: “I will give Thee the heathen for Thine inheritance,” and that means the people of California, a large part of them, “and the uttermost parts of the earth for Thy possession,” and that means China.

Is there anything special about the Chinese nature that puts them outside the recuperating, renewing forces that exist in Jesus Christ? And I read: “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us,” and again, “that He by the grace of God should taste death for every man.” And I know that in that humanity and in that provision the Chinese are included. I hear Him say, “Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden,” and I know that the wretched millions of China are meant.

But may it not be true that the Chinese are so lost to spirituality that this whole power of renewing forces will be lost upon them? I read: “And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me.” And I know there is a sweet attractiveness in the Saviour of men dying for them, that is able to break up the dull apathy of Chinamen as well as others.

But is there power enough to wake up the Christian churches as well as the Chinese from their apathy? And I read that prayer for us, “that ye may know what is the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe according to the working of His mighty power which He wrought in Christ when he raised Him from the dead, and set Him at His own right hand in the Heavenly places,” and I know that individuals and churches, even the whole Christian land, can be breathed upon and quickened by that resurrection life. And then the Divine Commission breaks in upon all our delay, saying, “Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature,” and I know that that means us, and that the time is now. I am confident that we have God’s word for it that this work can be done, and that we are to set about it without delay; and having this foundation I care for little else. But we have more if we require it.

2. We have God’s providence. His providence that has pushed the column of progress forward from the moment the Life came forth from the tomb in the garden, and began to be preached to the nations, until now its head occupies the slopes of the mountains that overhang that distant continent, and looks upon it inevitably as its next field of conquest. That providence that has pushed this advance forward upon two parallel lines, that of spiritual and of political liberty, and has made them converge and come together for the first time in history upon this broad domain; that has brought along in the slow conflict and march, institutions and rights, the spoil of nineteen centuries of conflict, and planted them upon this continent, and opened the door of invitation to the East through a sea-coast line of twelve thousand miles, and another to the far West of four thousand. These providences of God, making our duty clear, are endorsed by those others that have broken up the seclusive habits of that people, and have turned the thoughts of her educated men, and the hopes of her commerce, and the needs of her industrious poor, toward our shores.

This writing of God’s providence seen in the majestic progress of events from the East and West meeting here, seen in the configuration of the continent, seen in the harsh language of war breaking open closed doors, and in the voice of peace, endorses that other word which God has given us, and proves that our interpretation was correct, and that we have an especial duty to this people, both at home and abroad.