Part 3

And neither we at home, nor those in the broad field, can afford to be left unnoticed or uncalled. They need it that souls may be born into the kingdom; we need it that we may by pure toil and sacrifice grow unto the stature and the likeness of our risen Lord.

The Church of Christ will not know more of the advancement of His kingdom or of its hindrances than it is told. God will not save us the trouble of the inquiry or the report. The Church of Christ will have no more enthusiasm in the work than it gets by entering into sympathy with those who do it, and with Him who died that it might go on.

And yet, in the light of all this already trite and quite self-evident truth, you hear it said, even by those who are concerned in the progress of the work, “What are we going to do with this increasing mass of missionary literature? We are quite flooded with it, and especially with these periodicals, these Missionary Heralds, and Home Missionaries and American Missionaries. Can’t we make it less? Can’t we combine them and double the thing up? It bothers us.” Ah, brethren, the wonder is that we do not cry for more and better. The wonder is not that so many take the missionary magazines, but so few, and that so few of those who take them read them.

Brethren, the time will come—if the time comes when men seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, not last—that Christian men and women will not want to wait a month to glance over the few pages of a missionary magazine; but will want to know the latest news of the advancement of Christ’s Kingdom in the morning before they look to see the stock-list or the scandal-list of the day before. When the question of the morning will be what new progress, what new delays, what new need for the advancing hosts of Christian warriors; and at night the thought will be, the sun has gone to shine on other fields and other laborers, and while we sleep this work goes on. And in those days it shall go on with speed and sureness.

Let our missionary literature then be not lessened in quantity or deteriorated in quality. Let not our agents think the time is lost in which they stop to tell us of the work. The growth of Christ’s people at home is as important as the conquests of His grace abroad, indeed, the last will be largely proportioned to the first. Let ingenuity and enterprise be put into these channels of communication. Let the facts be fresh and full—more fresh and full than ever. Let them be clothed in choice and skillful diction. Let us leave the arts which the satanic or the merely mundane press monopolize to their uses. Let us not grudge the cost. It is not cost of administration at all. It is not cost of collection, though it helps that department greatly. It is more than all the missionary work of each society for the constituency that supports it. Our churches and our Christians here at home need it for their own vitalizing and the direction of their awakened energies. If our fires be not kept up at home the warmth will not be diffused. These are days of organization. It used to be that if a man had lost his way in these then dark country roads some one must go out alone with his hand-lantern to guide him to safe shelter. Now your streets are full of lamps, and your illuminated signs band them at every corner. You may take all the care that is possible of the lamps and burners; it will do no good if you neglect to keep the fires up where the illuminating gas is made. If the fires go out there the lights go out in every street and home. Do not let us ask these organizations to lessen their efforts to inform, to quicken and to guide our missionary zeal at home, as though it were not an important part of their legitimate work.

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REPORT ON CHINESE WORK.

The report of your committee on the Chinese Department of the American Missionary Association is as follows: The keynote of the year’s work is success. Four more schools, 256 more scholars enrolled, nine more teachers, with an increase of four Chinese instructors. The number of those professing to forsake idolatry in excess of last year, 19. There have 121 given good evidence of conversion—last year 106, making 400 who have embraced Christianity during the history of the Mission. Only seven thousand dollars of the nearly twelve thousand dollars expenses of the mission came out of the treasury of the Association. The number of local churches contributing has doubled. The receipts of the “California Chinese Mission” have gained 37 per cent. These gratifying facts inspire confidence that this work in purpose and method is blessed of God. They should beget a zeal commensurate with the hope they enkindle.

The new mission established by the American Board in Hong Kong—the natural fruit of this work—places peculiar emphasis upon its value, as its initial demand came from Chinamen Christianized by its influence. The Rev. Mr. Hager goes to this important control not only with the prayers of his American brethren behind him, but escorted over and welcomed by the devout supplications of specimen Chinese converts. It is an omen of profound significance that four or five Chinese workers for Christ, trained in these schools, contribute their invaluable services to the enterprise. It is equally suggestive that the Chinese Christians remaining behind cheerfully gave $500, adding to their faith, men, and to men, money, an evidence of the genuineness of their confidence. The past year’s experience alone demonstrates that most of the ingenious, infamous charges made against this people are lies. So Providence has opened a golden opportunity. The narrow and bigoted ignorance, lack of patriotism, lack of statesmanship, lack of humanity, lack of equitable dealing exhibited by our Government in its recent legislation on the Chinese question have corraled 75,000 of them on these shores. It is the open day for Christian privilege. Cannot the majority of these be surrounded by our faith, wrought on by the power of Christianity, saturated by a genuine Christian life and made the standing army for whom we shall send officers and soldiers to conquest the empire? If the teeming millions are appalling can we not subdue this installment isolated by inscrutable wisdom for this Christian experiment?

With such a present and pressing basis of appeal this work should have abundant means to reach without delay the limit of its capacity.

If there be not vital Christian warmth sufficient in the United States to resuscitate this waif upon our coasts, how can we hope to rescue the myriad nation? It is floundering in the Arctic Ocean of heathenism.

Respectfully Submitted,

W. A. BARTLETT, Chairman.

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ADDRESS OF REV. WILLIAM ALVIN BARTLETT, D.D.

After remarking that the Chinese question was little in some aspects, as when fifty million people frantically rise to defend themselves against a paltry handful of 75,000 Chinamen, Dr. Bartlett continues: But there is a sense in which it is large. It is a large question to any man. We find, according to the best accounts, 430 odd millions of Chinamen. It is the largest question of statesmanship and of commerce to know how best to handle the largest body of men who live together, and have lived together the longest, on the planet, and that speak one language.

But if it is large commercially, what is it in a Christian point of view? We go here and there picking up the scraps and the scattered remnants of races, but look at this majestic aggregation of humanity; look at their tremendous history! It is the largest question to-day before the missionary Christianity of the world.

Well, I am to say a word or two about the Chinese in America. How did they come here? They came here on the invitation of the Americans. California boasted at first of the grand people they were to receive. But that soon changed, and they began a system of ingenious abuse, such as has never been equalled. Take the laws passed by San Francisco—the “basket” law; the “cubic foot of air” law, under which, if a Chinaman was found living in a room with less than 500 cubic feet of air, he was thrust into a prison where he would not have over 200 cubic feet of air; and the “tax” law, under which Chinamen were taxed for sending their children to school and not permitted to send them. Every man in the street took the license himself of breaking every law of God and of humanity by pounding and stoning them. Then, it was not enough for the municipality to seize this question, but the State took hold of it. The Legislature of California settled all ethnological questions at once. They passed a law and said, by majority, that the Chinaman was an _Indian_! That settled it. Then the nation took hold of it and passed a law—these great 50,000,000 of people against 75,000 of people.

So the nation passed a law to keep the Chinamen out, violating all the traditions of the country, and to import _the Chinese wall!_ They ceased importing the Chinamen and imported their wall—a barbaric, ramshackled old thing of a great many centuries. It was a kind of waistband to the Chinese Empire when it was young; but they burst it long ago and ran over it.

This infamy was carried to this extent. A committee was appointed by the United States Senate, and a corresponding committee from the House, in 1876, to investigate this subject thoroughly. They examined 130 witnesses. They took over 1,200 pages of evidence from experts in all departments in regard to Chinese history and ethnology and everything else. They met them face to face and talked it over. Senator Sargent, the chairman of the Committee, made this statement in his report. He says, in the first place, that the Chinaman is an “_indigestible mass_.” Well, that is not quite definite; a man hardly knows how to handle such a statement as that. It is a kind of mince-pie, I suppose, in the body politic. I think I shall leave that for the gastric juice to analyze. But his next assertion is more practical. He says that the brain capacity of the Chinaman is not sufficient to furnish motive power for self-government; for all that, he has governed himself since the time that Senator Sargent’s ancestors, assuming him to be an Anglo-Saxon, were cautiously cracking acorns in Northern Europe and wearing bearskins! Mr. Pixley, a gentleman we sent to California from my part of the State of New York, a lawyer, and violently opposed to the Chinaman, says in his opinion before this Committee that the Chinaman is the inferior of any being that God ever made; he says that a specimen cannot be produced that has ever been affected in any particular by Christian influences, and that in his (Pixley’s) opinion the Chinaman hasn’t any soul, or if he has a soul it is not worth saving. Gentlemen, these things have been put into laws and organized before people of influence, and their animus spent itself in that infamous legislation in Congress which abrogated a treaty without consultation and flew in the face of a hundred years of precedents.

What is the fact? Why, the fact is that Chinamen are human beings. They are _honest_ human beings as the rule goes. The word of a Chinese merchant in California is taken everywhere. They are _industrious_ and _frugal_. Senator Cassidy said—he was very much opposed to them—in this book of testimony to which I have referred: “They are the most ingenious, industrious and frugal people on the planet; and if they come into competition with us in low forms of industry to-day, they will come in higher forms to-morrow.”

There was an old philosopher who lived 500 years before Christ, Confucius by name, who wrote certain maxims; and it does seem as though he was inspired to look ahead precisely at this treaty that they passed at Washington, when he said, “It is an evidence of the superior man, of the great moral man, the true man, that he adheres strictly to the old agreements, however long they may have stood.” He was asked if he could put into one word what would express the whole duty of man, and he said, “Is not that word '_reciprocity_'?” (That was a “reciprocity” treaty.) He says, “We should not ask another to do unto us what we would not be willing to do unto him.” And then he says, “The superior man has regard to virtue and to the sanctions of law; but the small man only thinks of himself and what favors he is to receive.” It looks like an inspired and animated riddling of this whole question as it stands to-day before the nation.

One of the largest land proprietors and wheat-growers in California said that the work could not be done without the Chinamen; they have reclaimed two millions of acres.

Now, mind you, with all the wrongs that the Chinese have received on our shores, every little disturbance on the Chinese coast which has ever occurred, or where a mission station has been sacked by a mob, we have collected and been paid every dollar of the damage; and the Chinese Government has paid nearly a million dollars to our Government for the wrongs perpetrated upon American people But this Government has not paid a dollar to the Chinese. There is a claim which the Chinese Embassy are now pressing on the Government, for $40,000 that was destroyed in one night in Colorado; but the reply upon such claims usually is, “We have not been in the habit of paying such claims to Chinamen.” Isn’t that justice? Isn’t that purity of legislation?

The Chinese are an _educated people_. They have vast libraries, large and broad, rich in literature. They have the lives of great men. They know about our Washington: they teach about him in their schools. Do we know anything about their Washingtons—about their great men who have guided the grandest nation, in some respects, that history has given us any account of for nearly 3,000 years, possibly more? We know about Yung Wing, who graduated at Yale College, taking the prizes in English composition. We know the standing of their students in our colleges generally. We know the fact that of the 75,000 Chinese in this country every one can read and write. In this country, according to the census before the last, we had over 5,000,000 who could not read and write; so that there are hardly Chinamen enough in this country to be schoolmasters to those of our number who cannot read and write! Dr. Hedge in Boston stated some years ago that, in a conversation with Charles Sumner, Sir John Bowring, the representative of Her Majesty at the Court of Pekin, said that when he was there the Chinese Ministers were the superiors of any European cabinet. Mr. Sumner replied: “I am astonished! You do not pretend to compare them with Lord Palmerston, Lord Derby and Mr. Gladstone?” Said he: “I mean precisely what I say, without any invidious comparison; I will add that the Prime Minister of China, during my residence in Pekin, has not, in my opinion, his intellectual superior upon the planet.”

The Chinese are a _cleanly_ people, a _decent_ people. The Chinese laborer washes himself all over every day. As a rule they can come into our mission schools and sit beside our ladies with perfect propriety. When I was preaching in Indianapolis we had every Chinaman in the city in our schools. They are not a clannish people; they are glad for American society.

They have crimes and vices. They are human. They lie and steal, and gamble, and have their peculiar method of getting intoxicated with opium. But I don’t know as it ever has been proven that they can carry on lying to such a magnificent extent as we do in an ordinary political campaign, and they have never risen to the refined plundering of Wall street. They say they take opium, and you know how they took it—they took it at the cannon’s mouth at first. England must make 400 per cent. profit in the poppy fields of India. It was shocking to them to the utmost; and their torment has gone on ever since in homes that were never addicted to any crazier drug than tea and knew nothing of a hell so orthodox as the delirium tremens. The Emperor petitioned England, in a document which I think has not its equal in all the documents of Governments, not to set fire to the morals of his people by loading them with their accursed opium. But they did.

The Chinese worship their ancestors. Well, if I had to choose the least of two improprieties, I think I would prefer to pay a very hearty and cordial appreciation of my grandfather rather than to curse my children with such doctrines as have been proposed toward the Chinese. It is better, I think, to worship your ancestors than to damn your posterity.

But the Chinese have noble qualities. In the days of the yellow fever at Memphis I was near it. We almost felt the hot breath of that dreadful pestilence. We needed money and men; and there came a telegram from San Francisco that the Chinese merchants of that city had contributed $12,000 for the yellow fever sufferers. That looked like putting the prayer of Christ upon the cross into physical results: “Lord, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

We know the Chinese philosophy, the height of their morality; we know the purity of Confucius’ recommendations and the wondrous statement of Lotse that we should love our enemies; and we know that the highest crest waves of this Chinese morality throw spray around the feet of Jesus. I have stood this summer in the far West. I have stood where you can test civilization. There in Seattle stood a university on our right hand, and on it the Indian words _Al-Ki_—by and by—the motto of the Territory—“By and by we will show you.” Brethren, I am not given to nightmares nor to day dragons, but it did seem to me as we stood there and looked out upon that majestic sheet of water, Puget Sound, being nearer in the centre of the majority of the population in the planet than we are here, that the day would come, with that matchless harbor, that wonderful climate, with coal and iron in the vicinity, with all cereals and fruits possible, when the throne of power would be transferred from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast, and when the argosies of the world would float without any bar, either in Puget Sound or in the cities around it, and ride there at peace in the security of a gospelized and millennialized age. It can only be done by our appreciation of the necessity of keeping our Christianity clean and solid and aggressive, and on the old basis of sin and salvation through a crucified Redeemer.

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REPORT OF COMMITTEE ON INDIAN MISSIONS.

Your Committee, to whom has been referred that part of the annual statement of the Executive Committee which relates to the American Indians, desire to report as follows:

The chief event of the year, in the Indian department, is the adoption by this Association of the Indian Missions of the American Board. Your Committee look upon this as an event of conspicuous importance in the history of the Association. As long ago as 1872, at the annual meeting of that year, the Committees on the Indian and the foreign work suggested a double transfer—namely, the transfer of the foreign missions of the Association to the American Board, and the transfer of the Indian missions of the Board to this Association. The propriety of such an exchange has seemed obvious to many patrons of the two societies for some time. However satisfactory the explanation of the existing condition of things afforded by the historical development of the two organizations, it was plain that the time had come for such a unifying and concentrating of the work of this Association as would result from leaving the foreign field to others, and assuming the care of those missions in our own country which our foreign missionary society had so well established.

These missions are among the Dakotas, one of the most widely extended and important of the American Indian stocks. The largest of these missions—that at the Sisseton agency, formerly under the care of the lamented Stephen R. Riggs—has chosen for its new mother not our Association, but another missionary board, by which it will doubtless be thoroughly cared for and warmly cherished. The missions which actually come under our care constitute an important group of churches and schools, and should be received with a hearty welcome by an Association with such antecedents as this. The new trust committed to us calls for new purpose and energy in our specific work.

We find that these Dakota missions are not dead or dying, but thoroughly alive. And because they are thoroughly alive they need very real help. The men in charge of them are men awake to their opportunities, believers in a forward movement, and in whatever legitimate experiments may be involved therein. We feel that in all such experiments they should have the ready co-operation of the Christian Church. We therefore heartily endorse the Executive Committee in their plans for enlargement in the Dakota field—for improvements in the mission property and in methods of work, where they are called for, and the establishment of new missions in places which promise success.

One project, your Committee believe, deserves to be regarded with special favor, the establishment of a school—agricultural, mechanical and normal—at Fort Sully. The Executive Committee have secured a delightful site for such a school, and they know the man to take charge of it. What is wanted is money to furnish the proper financial basis, and we can scarcely doubt that this will be forth-coming. The industrial school method of missionary work has already been thoroughly tested at the east—in Hampton and Carlisle—and the verdict is altogether favorable. There is good reason to believe that the adoption of the same method among the Indians themselves would result in real benefit. Let the work of instruction, in all its interesting details, be carried on where the red man can see it, and it will surely make its impression upon him. At all events, we have in favor of this view the opinions of men who may be looked upon as experts in this matter.

In adopting as its aim these Dakota missions, and thus enlarging its strictly missionary work among the American Indians, the American Missionary Association gives its approval anew to the attempt, now so long continued, to Christianize the red men. There are those who scoff at the idea of such a work; but history—not to say the Gospel—teaches us better. No race of men has yet been discovered so low that it cannot be reached and moved by the religion of the Crucified, and the American Indians are certainly no exception. The Indians as a whole are by no means the lowest or the least susceptible; and the results on record are far from insignificant. God has blessed the efforts of his church in their behalf throughout the past two hundred years, and we know he will continue to bless them. Respectfully submitted.

JOSEPH ANDERSON, Chairman.

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ADDRESS OF REV. DR. ANDERSON.

When the question arose in my mind in what line to follow up this brief report, it seemed to me that the subject of Indian wrongs and Indian rights had been sufficiently discussed for the present in this Association and elsewhere, and that it might be of advantage for us to look for a little while in another direction.