themselves to get a dim impression that the world is becoming better,
more kindly, more charitable, and that we are approximating a time
when, by the pure influences of increased material appliances and
“well-regulated human nature,” the hatreds and strifes both of nations
and sects will have measurably ceased. The delusion is a pleasant one,
but it is none the less a delusion, and will not endure the slightest
contact with the sharp edge of fact. In this nineteenth century,
notwithstanding the peace society, more human beings have lost their
lives by war than in any other since the advent of our Lord. In this,
the freest, the most prosperous, and, so far as the masses are
concerned, the best-instructed of all Christian countries, we have but
had breathing time since one of the bloodiest civil wars on record. In
the lull (protracted by war and its results) many Catholics seem to
have become in like manner possessed with an undefined notion that the
people who made the Penal Laws and executed them have become imbued
with a milder spirit toward the church; that Know-nothingism is a thing
of the past, the virtue of the cry of “No Popery” dissipated, and the
fell spirit of the Native American party utterly extinct.
Those who think thus will see cause to awake from their dream on
examining the volume whose title heads this article. In October, 1876,
a Joint Special Committee of three senators and three members of the
Lower House sat in San Francisco for the purpose of procuring testimony
in regard to the advisability of restricting or abolishing the
immigration of Mongolians to this country—a question which has been for
some time exciting at least a considerable section of the inhabitants
of our Pacific coast. Whether truly or falsely we cannot say, but the
impression is produced that the Catholic, and more particularly the
Irish Catholic, population of California has ranged itself in hostility
to the Chinese. If this be true we should be very sorry for it, knowing
full well that by any such action foreigners of all sorts, more
especially Catholics, are simply supplying whips of scorpions with
which they will be lashed on the outburst of the next campaign (under
whatsoever name it may be known) conducted on principles of hostility
to them. On its face it looks altogether likely that so plausible a
movement as this opposition to the Chinese should take with a laboring
class not very well posted in the principles of political economy, and
we know that the large majority of white laboring people are in San
Francisco Catholic, while certainly a great many of them are Irishmen.
Their priests are too few and have too much to do to give them lectures
on Say, Smith, and Ricardo; and it is no part of their duty, still less
would it be a pleasure, to instruct them how they shall view purely
political issues, whether local or national. Repeating, then, that we
cannot but deem it a terrible blunder for their own sakes, and utterly
against their own real interests, that these people should so range
themselves against the influx of the Chinese, we have certainly no
right to dictate to them how they shall vote or on what side they shall
exert any influence they may have; and we must add that they seem to
err (if error there be) in very good company, and plenty of it, since
both political parties have in their national platforms endorsed the
views said to be held by the Irish Catholics of California, as did also
both Republicans and Democrats in the last campaign of the Golden
State.
This report contains the sworn testimony on the subject at issue of one
hundred and thirty witnesses; but we only call attention to the
evidence of some of the preachers, and that, too, not on the general
merits of their testimony or concerning Chinese immigration at all, but
on account of the Vatinian hatred which they have gone out of the way
to display towards Catholics, and the deadly venom they exhibit towards
Irishmen especially. For just as women are sometimes most bloodthirsty
during a war, far outdoing in rancor the combatants themselves, so
would preachers seem to be the least charitable of the human species—to
have, as Dean Swift well remarked, “just enough religion to make them
hate, and not enough to make them love, one another.” The first of
these worthy representatives of Christian charity and disseminators of
the truth is a certain Rev. O. W. Loomis, in the employ of the
Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions, who takes occasion to say:
“_Unlike some others who come to America, as we have been told (and who
manage to get to the ballot-boxes very soon), they [the Chinese] are
not sworn to support any foreign hierarchy and foreign ecclesiastical
magnate who claims the whole earth as his dominion_” (p. 417). While
the English of this sentence is very far from clear, yet the animus of
the whole is so patent that he must needs be a very stupid fellow
indeed who does not perceive that Catholics are aimed at. Whether Mr.
Loomis “_has been informed_” that Catholics come to America, or that
they reach the ballot-boxes early, or that they are sworn to support a
foreign hierarchy, or that the Chinese are not under such obligations,
is far from being as limpid as “bog-water,” and it is to be hoped that,
in his instructions to his neophytes, he seldom degenerates into such
want of perspicuity; still more would it be desirable that he should
confine himself more strictly in his usual ministrations to the truth
and to matters within his own knowledge than he does when before the
committee and on oath.
It is distinctly _false_ that Catholic foreigners, in coming to this
country, make a business of getting to the ballot-boxes any sooner than
the law allows them to do. It is equally mendacious, if he means to
assert the same thing of any one set of Catholics as a specific
nationality. If the statement were as true as it is false, scurrilous,
and malicious, that “man of God” could not possibly know more than a
few individual instances, and could not predicate the fact as true of a
whole nationality, any more than the writer (who happens to have known
in his life four instances in which young Americans voted without
having attained their majority) would be justified in slanderously
describing the young men of the United States as in the habit of
perjuring themselves in order to anticipate the right of elective
franchise. But our friend, though on oath, never blinks—in fact, he
has, while on oath, gone out of his way to drag in the above statement,
and is only prevented from taking the bit in his teeth and careering
madly over the whole plain of anti-Catholic bigotry by being checked
peremptorily with the information furnished him by Representative
Piper: “_That is entirely foreign to the matter at issue._”
As to the assertion that Catholics swear allegiance to the Pope in any
sense that would interfere with their fealty to any temporal rule or
government, its absurdity has been so often, so ably, and so clearly
demonstrated that it is only persons of the third sex who at this day
pretend to believe it. We will give even Mr. Loomis credit for
appreciating the distinction between the loyalty which his people owe
to the confession of faith, their synods and presbyteries, and that
which they owe to the government of the land. We wish we could in
conscience credit him with as much candor as ability and knowledge in
the premises; for a great deal of his testimony proves him to be by no
means one of those persons whom we pass by as being entitled to a
“fool’s pardon.” Did it never occur to this man, and to others of his
way of thought or expression, that this oath or obligation of two
hundred million Catholics must be of very little avail—might, in short,
quite as well not have been taken—if its only result is to land the
Pope here in the fag end of the nineteenth century, in the Vatican,
without an acre of land over which he can exercise temporal
jurisdiction, while Catholics all over the world, with the numbers, the
power, and the means to restore him, if they had but the will, lie
supinely by, not making a move, either as governments or as
individuals, in his behalf? That bugbear is too transparent for use;
people can no longer be scared by it; it is high time to excogitate
another and a more plausible one, if you are still bent on war with the
Pope. For our own part, we would recommend the propriety of a change;
but that change should be to the culture of Christian charity, the
practice of the golden rule, not forgetting the commandment which
people of Mr. Loomis’ persuasion call the _ninth_. Ah! Mr. Loomis,
hatred springs apace fast enough among men without any necessity for
its culture on the part of professing religious teachers.
Again, the same professor of the doctrine that “the earth is the
Lord’s,” that “we are all his children,” and that “we are all one in
Christ,” announces: “_I was a Native American on principle, and I
believe that America should belong to Americans_” (p. 464). This is
bad, in our opinion, but it is English, it is intelligible, and it is
no doubt true as an utterance of his individual sentiment. The set of
principles referred to have twice been adjudged by the voice of the
American people, and condemned on both occasions as anti-American,
opposed to the genius and traditions of our people, and subversive of
the aims which made us one of the foremost nations of the earth. Mr.
Loomis, or any other man, has an inherent right to believe in them, if
he so list; but we question much his discretion in dragging his
enunciation of political principles into his sworn evidence on the
Chinese question, and we doubt much whether a knowledge that such is
his belief would be calculated to enhance the regard of the Chinese,
among whom he states that he is an evangelist, for either the
philanthropy or the hard sense of their coryphæus.
That there may be no doubt about the intensity of his virulence
against the church, he returns to the charge; and, strangely enough,
it is the same committeeman that now goads him on who, on the
previously-mentioned reference to foreign hierarchs, stopped his
mouth by stating that his opinions on that subject were not at issue
in the examination.
“_Ques._ You spoke about these Irish as people coming here who
have sworn allegiance to some foreign potentate. To whom have
you reference?
“_Ans._ I refer to the Roman Catholics.
“_Ques._ Do you, then, think Chinese immigration less dangerous
to our institutions than that of Roman Catholics?
“_Ans._ I think so; decidedly less. The Chinese do not purpose
to intermeddle with our religious rights. They have no
hierarchy. They are not sworn to support any religious system.
They are mixed up at home. They have no one religion. They may
be Mahometans.
“_Ques._ You think they are less dangerous than European
Christians of a certain persuasion?
“_Ans._ I think they are less dangerous than Roman Catholics.
“_Ques._ Are they less dangerous than Europeans?
“_Ans._ Whether they be Europeans or of any other nationality,
providing they are Romanists.
“_Ques._ Suppose the Chinese should become Catholics; then they
would become dangerous?
“_Ans._ I think so.
“_Ques._ The Roman Catholics are not Christians, then?
“_Ans._ They are Christians, but not Protestant Christians.
They are Roman Catholic Christians. I make a wide distinction
between Protestants and Romanists” (p. 469).
Thus this man, professing himself an ambassador of Christ, deliberately
puts himself on record as holding that pagans who know nothing of
Christ’s atonement, and who, in his phrase, worship idols, are
preferable to those who have had invoked upon them the name of God in
baptism, who believe in the Divinity, bow at the name and hope to be
saved by the merits of Jesus. Could the spirit of the most malevolent
_odium theologicum_ go further? Would such an assertion be believed of
any ignorant communist, much less of one who claims to be a minister of
Christ, were it not contained in print in the report of a Congressional
committee? If the man believes so little in the influence of the
religion of the Saviour whom he preaches as his statement would
indicate, it is his duty at once to resign, and relieve the society
which supports him of the burden of a salary which he cannot
conscientiously earn. “Believe,” said the apostle, “in the Lord Jesus
Christ, and thou shalt be saved!” “Not enough,” says Rev. Loomis; “you
must be additionally a Protestant, or a belief in the Saviour will
profit you no whit.” Has any man yet ever had a clear definition of
that term, “_Protestant_”? Thomas à Kempis and St. Vincent of Paul, St.
Augustine and St. Charles Borromeo, the glorious cohort of martyrs and
confessors, would be dangerous citizens of the United States compared
with Ah Sin and Fan Chow! This is certainly information of an
unlooked-for kind, and the man competent to impart it does not usually
hide his light in the dreary pages of a Congressional committee’s
report. He says himself that he has been a missionary since 1844. By
consequence he must have attained to a good age, and the great wonder
to us is that a man of such astoundingly original views has not
heretofore made his mark upon an age always anxious “to see or hear
some new thing.”
The assertion that Catholics purpose to interfere with the rights of
Protestants or other unbelievers, implied in the statement that the
Chinese have no such intention, is both too indefinite and too futile
for discussion. Catholics in all countries, but more especially in
English-speaking countries, have for the past two hundred years had all
they could manage to be allowed to follow the dictates of their own
faith, free of legal pains and penalties, to have any time to spare for
concocting plans against the civil or religious rights of others. In
the only English-speaking state that they founded they established
liberty of conscience, which statute was abolished by the friends of
Mr. Loomis just as soon as they had the power.
But Mr. Loomis assigns reasons in favor of the superior desirability of
pagan over Christian immigration, and the prominent ones seem to be
that they have essentially no religion—or rather, that they have fifty;
that they have no hierarchy; that, in fact, they do not support any
religious system—to sum it up, that they are _mixed up at home_! How
ill does not the adversary of mankind brook the distinctive unity of
the church of God! Like Pharao’s magicians, everything else he can
counterfeit or imitate; but the unity of the church is too much for
him. Common sense teaches the most ignorant, that if our Saviour
founded any church at all he founded _one_, and not four hundred
jarring and jangling conventicles. Probably this is the gravamen. The
Catholic, strong in the oneness of his church, and stanch in the
conviction that everything not of it must be a sham emanating from the
father of lies, will not be perverted by Mr. Loomis, charm he never so
wisely; while, on the other hand, a lot of pagans, especially of pagans
who were “considerably mixed up at home,” might furnish grist for Mr.
Loomis’ peculiar gospel mill, with due toll for the miller. As with the
apostle before, so this preacher now differs with the Saviour, who said
and thought that there should be “_one fold and one Shepherd_.” _Absit
blasphemia!_ but the sects all differ widely both from the Master, his
apostles, and the church, with which he promised to abide for ever.
Lest, however, any Catholic should lay to his soul the flattering
unction that his American birth might eliminate him from the general
unfitness of Catholics for citizenship in the United States or from an
entire appreciation of the institutions of his native country, Mr.
Loomis is very careful to inform us that it does not matter whether
they be Europeans or _of any other nationality; if they are Catholics_,
they are not so fit for immigration to this country, still less for the
exercise of citizenship, as if they were “_heathen Chinese_.” Here is a
man who declaims against Catholics and denounces them for purposing to
interfere with the rights of those who disagree with them in religious
views, and in the same breath argues the unfitness of a population of
possibly nine millions for citizenship in his own country, they being
at the time all residents, mostly citizens and largely natives, merely
because they belong to the old religion—the religion of Charles Carroll
of Carrollton. “Resolved,” said the meeting, “that the earth belongs to
the saints.” “Resolved,” added the same body, “that we are the saints.”
Did it ever by chance occur to our friend of decidedly original, if
limited, intellect that Senator Casserly lives in his own town, and is
looked upon, with some reason, as a representative man, very well
posted upon American institutions, and that it would be very hard to
persuade the people of the United States of any latent disability on
the part of that senator to appreciate or support them? Mr. Loomis
makes a great distinction between a Catholic and a Protestant, and no
doubt the difference is considerable; but the chasm is by no means as
great as that which separates the Christian from the bigot, and it is
hard for us to put Mr. Loomis in the ranks of the former. _Abeat_
Loomis.
Rev. W. W. Brier, after describing himself as “a Presbyterian minister
by profession, who makes his living by raising fruit,” proceeds thus:
“_Ques._ Would a reasonable restriction of Chinamen be an
advantage or not?
“_Ans._ If a restriction is to be made in respect to China, it
ought to be made upon people who are far worse for us than
Chinese. I would trade a certain nationality off for Chinamen
until there was not one of the stock left in trade” (p. 575).
Other portions of his evidence show that he herein refers to the Irish
as inferior to the Chinese. How he regards the latter is shown by his
response to the suggestion of a possible danger resulting from the
presence of sixty thousand Chinamen in the State, without any women of
their kind, viz.:
“_Ans._ The fact is, they are laborers, and I regard them very
much in the light I do any other thing we want to use—horses,
mules, or machinery” (p. 577).
When asked if he would be willing to give the Chinese a chance to
overrun California, he says:
“_Ans._ Why not? As well as to give the Irish a chance! My real
opinion is that we would be better off without any more
foreigners (p. 580).
“_Ques._ Are you quite willing there shall be no laws to
prevent this State from becoming a Chinese province?
“_Ans._ My opinion is that there is a great deal worse class of
foreigners in our land, who have all the rights of citizenship
and everything else” (p. 581).
That a man saturated to the heart’s core with such bitter prejudices
against any portion of God’s children should have, under any
circumstances, engaged in the work of saving souls may seem strange,
and we shall not here go into the explication, which would detain us
from our subject; but it is by no means surprising that such a person
should fail of success as an evangelist and devote his time and
prejudices to fruit-raising. He describes himself as a successful
fruit-grower, and we have good authority for believing that “no man can
serve two masters.” Not that he has given up preaching by any means;
for he tells of his ministering in the vineyard, which means with
people of his stamp delivering on Sunday an essay or so something after
the fashion of a screed from the _Spectator_, and taking leave of all
practical religion till the next Sunday. Of the ministrations of the
Catholic priest—going in and out daily among his parishioners,
preparing this one for death, comforting that one bereaved, advising
and warning the vicious, alleviating want and encouraging all—he knows
as little as his own mules. It appears by his evidence that he hires at
times as many as sixty-five or seventy Chinamen, and, as he confessedly
regards them in the same light as so much machinery, it is by no means
to be wondered at that he should prefer men who will submit to be so
regarded. The Chinaman possibly may, certainly the Irishman will not;
and, upon the whole, we should think very much less of an Irishman if
he had proved a favorite with such a specimen fossil as Rev. Brier. The
Irishman is quick, full of life, strong, prone to resent an insult,
courageous, and of all men least likely to allow himself to be trampled
upon, ignored, or regarded in the same light as the mules and horses
about the place. Further, it is more than likely that, in an encounter
of wit with an Irishman, Rev. Mr. Brier would not come out first; and
it is a dead certainty that Brier’s view of religion would appeal as
little to the Irishman’s sympathies as it probably does to those of the
reader. Taking, then, everything into account, we are not surprised
that this person should not like Irishmen, but we do wonder that he
should not have the grace to conceal the hypocrisy involved between his
own ostensible profession on the one side, and his utter disregard of
the dignity of humanity, of the value of the human soul, on the other.
Under such shepherds it is no wonder that the flock becomes scattered,
and, while we do not wish well to Protestantism at any time (for
individual Protestants we entertain the most kindly feelings), it would
be impossible for us to wish the system worse than that the watchmen
upon the walls of the fortress founded by Luther and Calvin may all
have the osseous heart, the hypocritical profession, and the eocene
brain of Rev. Mr. Brier. Calvinism is disintegrating very rapidly, in
all conscience; it needs but a few more years of the ministrations of
such reverend gentlemen as this to give it the final _quietus_.
Why, even Chinamen have in this century been touched by the progressive
spirit of the age. They emigrate, are found in California, the Sandwich
Islands, Australia, Singapore, etc. They have opened their ports to
foreigners, and are sending their young men to be educated both in the
United States and in Europe. And here we have the Rev. Mr. Brier—who
would build up in these United States a Chinese wall of exclusion, who
would have Japan and China return to their ancient policy of
non-intercourse, and who, if he had his way, would cause this great
country to join them—who says deliberately that the United States would
be “better off without any more foreigners.” He is a credit to the
college that educated him, the State that bred him, and the religion he
professes! _Exeat_ Brier.
Rev. S. V. Blakeslee is an orthodox Congregational minister, acting now
as editor of the _Pacific_, which he describes as “the oldest religious
newspaper on the coast.” Contrary to the former two ministers, he is
bitterly opposed to Chinamen, and is only less rancorous against them
than he is against the hated Irish Catholics. We give parts of his
examination, omitting much that would but lead us over ground already
trodden:
“_Ques._ Is there any other class of foreign labor that you
think has a tendency to render labor disreputable?
“_Ans._ Yes, I mean all whom we regard as inferior; to whom we
consign the work—all who are really inferior.
“_Ques._ What race would you put in that category?
“_Ans._ If I were to mention names, I believe the Americans
generally regard the Irish as very much inferior; yet I believe
if the priests were out of the way, if Romanism were out of the
way, the Irish would be equal to any people on earth. As it is,
they are inferior in intelligence, inferior in morality” (p.
1035).
In another portion of his testimony he complains that the people of his
town (Oakland), with forty thousand inhabitants, have by no means the
supply of Congregational and other Protestant churches which in the
East would be considered necessary, and is asked:
“_Ques._ There are many Catholics, are there not?
“_Ans._ Oh! Catholics can hardly be said to go to church. They
do not go to listen to a sermon; they do not go to get
instructed (p. 1037).
“_Ques._ Do the Irish assimilate with the American people?
“_Ans._ They do, if they are Protestant; but the priests mean
to keep them separate, and mean to keep them as a power in
America under their control” (p. 1041).
As to his knowledge of Catholic practice and belief, the following will
suffice, viz.: