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.
* * * * *
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.
* * * * *
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.
* * * * *
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.
There are few, I suppose, who are aware of the largeness of this
work as carried on upon our continent, few who appreciate the
amount of real labor and real suffering, I may say, endured in this
direction. In order to a correct estimate, it seems to me that
we ought not to lose sight of, but rather we ought to recognize,
the work which has been done by our Roman Catholic friends. They
began as long ago as 1611, and from that date onward until 1832, at
least, they carried on an extended work among the American Indians
upon eight or ten different and important fields. I find, by
looking over their lists, that 170 men gave themselves to the work
of saving the Indian from barbarism and elevating him to a higher
and Christian level during this period.
Then, in order to a correct appreciation of this work, we must
remember also what our beloved friends, the Moravians, have
done—not only what they did in Greenland, not only what they did
in the West Indies, but what they did within the bounds of our
own nation, especially in Pennsylvania and farther west. And so,
too, we must recognize the work done by the Episcopalians and the
Methodists and the Presbyterians, who, through a long series of
years and in varied fields, have been laboring for the conversion
of the American Indian.
But in none of these fields has a more satisfactory work been
done than that which has been done in this America of ours by the
Congregational churches and the men whom they have sent out. The
missionary work among the American Indians began with the founding
of the church in New England—began under the molding hand of John
Elliot in Massachusetts. A hundred years later than the day when
Elliot began that work another figure arose upon the stage of
history: David Brainerd, the humble, quiet young man, who gave
himself for Christ and for the beloved Indians, and labored and
suffered even unto death. And then, when we come down to 1813 or
thereabouts, we find the American Board, newly organized, turning
its attention to the Indians in the South and Southwest. In the
record of their early work we have such names as Cyrus Kingsbury
and Byington and Father Gleason, and in the far West Williamson and
Riggs, our lamented brethren to whom reference has already been
made, and many others, some of whom are still with us, including
our excellent brother and my fellow committeeman Rev. Cushing Eells.
Here we have a list of heroes doing their work quietly, silently,
patiently, yet a work deserving to be called heroic, as much so as
that which has been done on the islands of the sea and on the other
side of the globe—a work in which noble men and women have taken
part. What is the result? Here is the good seed sewing. What kind
of a harvest has been gathered? There are those who think—perhaps
it is the common impression—that the results of Indian missions
have been meagre and of little value at the best; but let us
consider. It seems to me that in any such calculation some account
should be made of what may be called the reciprocal effect produced
in the lives of the missionaries themselves and of the churches
sending them forth. I observe that Dr. Shay, author of the History
of Catholic Missions in America, referring to the extinction of the
Spanish missions in the southern part of our country, says that
even if they have become extinct and if there are no results that
we can trace to-day, that does not count for their condemnation
any more than the disappearance of the works of art produced so
long ago by Apelles and Zeuxis is to the condemnation of those
workers. He might have gone farther and called attention to the
effect produced upon the artists themselves by their contributions
to ancient art, the effect produced upon the artist anywhere by the
work that he does in his own field, the effect produced upon the
reformer by the work of reform which he accomplishes, the results
produced in the lives of missionaries who constitute so large a
company in our church from their labors, their sufferings and their
sorrows.
I noticed in a past number of the AMERICAN MISSIONARY published
during the present year that a cut had been reproduced representing
a group of Indians watching a railroad train—an impressive
picture; and it suggested to me that our aim should be to bring
these Indians of the West where they shall not stand suspiciously
watching a railroad train, the emblem of advancing civilization,
but where they shall co-operate with us and appreciate the railroad
train and make it theirs. We want them to adopt as rapidly as
possible all the appliances of our civilization, and above all we
want them to accept the Lord Jesus Christ.
* * * * *
ADDRESS OF REV. J. C. PRICE.