Of all stupid ill-feelings, the sentiment of my fellow Caucasians towards
our companions in the Chinese car was the most stupid and the worst.
They seemed never to have looked at them, listened to them, or thought of
them, but hated them _a priori_. The Mongols were their enemies in that
cruel and treacherous battle-field of money. They could work better and
cheaper in half a hundred industries, and hence there was no calumny too
idle for the Caucasians to repeat, and even to believe. They declared
them hideous vermin, and affected a kind of choking in the throat when
they beheld them. Now, as a matter of fact, the young Chinese man is so
like a large class of European women, that on raising my head and
suddenly catching sight of one at a considerable distance, I have for an
instant been deceived by the resemblance. I do not say it is the most
attractive class of our women, but for all that many a man’s wife is less
pleasantly favoured. Again, my emigrants declared that the Chinese were
dirty. I cannot say they were clean, for that was impossible upon the
journey; but in their efforts after cleanliness they put the rest of us
to shame. We all pigged and stewed in one infamy, wet our hands and
faces for half a minute daily on the platform, and were unashamed. But
the Chinese never lost an opportunity, and you would see them washing
their feet—an act not dreamed of among ourselves—and going as far as
decency permitted to wash their whole bodies. I may remark by the way
that the dirtier people are in their persons the more delicate is their
sense of modesty. A clean man strips in a crowded boathouse; but he who
is unwashed slinks in and out of bed without uncovering an inch of skin.
Lastly, these very foul and malodorous Caucasians entertained the
surprising illusion that it was the Chinese waggon, and that alone, which
stank. I have said already that it was the exceptions and notably the
freshest of the three.
These judgments are typical of the feeling in all Western America. The
Chinese are considered stupid, because they are imperfectly acquainted
with English. They are held to be base, because their dexterity and
frugality enable them to underbid the lazy, luxurious Caucasian. They
are said to be thieves; I am sure they have no monopoly of that. They
are called cruel; the Anglo-Saxon and the cheerful Irishman may each
reflect before he bears the accusation. I am told, again, that they are
of the race of river pirates, and belong to the most despised and
dangerous class in the Celestial Empire. But if this be so, what
remarkable pirates have we here! and what must be the virtues, the
industry, the education, and the intelligence of their superiors at home!
Awhile ago it was the Irish, now it is the Chinese that must go. Such is
the cry. It seems, after all, that no country is bound to submit to
immigration any more than to invasion; each is war to the knife, and
resistance to either but legitimate defence. Yet we may regret the free
tradition of the republic, which loved to depict herself with open arms,
welcoming all unfortunates. And certainly, as a man who believes that he
loves freedom, I may be excused some bitterness when I find her sacred
name misused in the contention. It was but the other day that I heard a
vulgar fellow in the Sand-lot, the popular tribune of San Francisco,
roaring for arms and butchery. “At the call of Abraham Lincoln,” said
the orator, “ye rose in the name of freedom to set free the negroes; can
ye not rise and liberate yourselves from a few dirty Mongolians?”
For my own part, I could not look but with wonder and respect on the
Chinese. Their forefathers watched the stars before mine had begun to
keep pigs. Gun-powder and printing, which the other day we imitated, and
a school of manners which we never had the delicacy so much as to desire
to imitate, were theirs in a long-past antiquity. They walk the earth
with us, but it seems they must be of different clay. They hear the
clock strike the same hour, yet surely of a different epoch. They travel
by steam conveyance, yet with such a baggage of old Asiatic thoughts and
superstitions as might check the locomotive in its course. Whatever is
thought within the circuit of the Great Wall; what the wry-eyed,
spectacled schoolmaster teaches in the hamlets round Pekin; religions so
old that our language looks a halfing boy alongside; philosophy so wise
that our best philosophers find things therein to wonder at; all this
travelled alongside of me for thousands of miles over plain and mountain.
Heaven knows if we had one common thought or fancy all that way, or
whether our eyes, which yet were formed upon the same design, beheld the
same world out of the railway windows. And when either of us turned his
thoughts to home and childhood, what a strange dissimilarity must there
not have been in these pictures of the mind—when I beheld that old, gray,
castled city, high throned above the firth, with the flag of Britain
flying, and the red-coat sentry pacing over all; and the man in the next
car to me would conjure up some junks and a pagoda and a fort of
porcelain, and call it, with the same affection, home.
Another race shared among my fellow-passengers in the disfavour of the
Chinese; and that, it is hardly necessary to say, was the noble red man
of old story—over whose own hereditary continent we had been steaming all
these days. I saw no wild or independent Indian; indeed, I hear that
such avoid the neighbourhood of the train; but now and again at way
stations, a husband and wife and a few children, disgracefully dressed
out with the sweepings of civilisation, came forth and stared upon the
emigrants. The silent stoicism of their conduct, and the pathetic
degradation of their appearance, would have touched any thinking
creature, but my fellow-passengers danced and jested round them with a
truly Cockney baseness. I was ashamed for the thing we call
civilisation. We should carry upon our consciences so much, at least, of
our forefathers’ misconduct as we continue to profit by ourselves.
If oppression drives a wise man mad, what should be raging in the hearts
of these poor tribes, who have been driven back and back, step after
step, their promised reservations torn from them one after another as the
States extended westward, until at length they are shut up into these
hideous mountain deserts of the centre—and even there find themselves
invaded, insulted, and hunted out by ruffianly diggers? The eviction of
the Cherokees (to name but an instance), the extortion of Indian agents,
the outrages of the wicked, the ill-faith of all, nay, down to the
ridicule of such poor beings as were here with me upon the train, make up
a chapter of injustice and indignity such as a man must be in some ways
base if his heart will suffer him to pardon or forget. These old,
well-founded, historical hatreds have a savour of nobility for the
independent. That the Jew should not love the Christian, nor the
Irishman love the English, nor the Indian brave tolerate the thought of
the American, is not disgraceful to the nature of man; rather, indeed,
honourable, since it depends on wrongs ancient like the race, and not
personal to him who cherishes the indignation.