CHAPTER Vi. THE FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF CHRISTENDOM.
That I looked upon Christendom and Englishspeaking peoples with peculiar reverence was not an altogether inexcusable weakness on mj part. It was the same weakness that made the Great Frederick of Prussia a slavish adorer of everything that was French. I learnt all that was noble, useful, and uplifting through the vehicle of the English language. I read my Bible in English, Barnes' commentaries were written in English, John Howard was an Englishman, and Washington and Daniel Webster were of English descent. A '^dime-novel" w^as never placed in my hand, and as for slangs, — the word itself I did not learn till long after my living among Englishspeaking people. My idea of Christian America was lofty, religious, Puritanic. I dreamed of its templed hills, and rocks that rang with hjanns and praises. Hebraisms, I thought, to be the prevailing speech of the American commonality, and cherub and cherubim, hallelujahs and amens, the common language of its streets.
I w^as often told upon good testimony that money is all in all in America, and that it is worshipped there as Almighty Dollar; that the race prejudice is so strong there that the yellow skin and almond-shaped eyes pass for objects of derision and dog-barking; etc., etc. But for me to credit such statements as anything near the truth was utterly impossible. The land of Patrick Henry and Abraham Lincoln, of Dorothea Dix and Stephen Girard, — how could it be a land of mammon-worsbip and race-distinction! I thought I had different eyes to judge of the matter— so strong was my confidence in what I had read and heard about the superiority of the Christian civilization over that of the Pagan. Indeed, the image of America as pictured upon my mind was that of a Holy Land.
At the day-break of Nov. 24, 1884, my enraptured eyes first caught the faint views of Christendom. Once more I descended to my steeragecabin, and there I was upon my knees — the moment was too serious for me to join with the popular excitement of the hour. As the low Coast Range came clearer to my views, the sense of my dreams being now realized overwhelmed me with gratitude, and tears trickled rapidly down my cheeks. Soon the Golden Gate was passed, and all the chimneys and mast-tops now presented to my vision appeared like so many church-spires pointing toward the sky. We landed — the company of some twenty young men — and were hackneyed to a hotel owned by an Irishman who was known to show special kindness to men of my nation. As my previous acquaintance with the Caucasian race had been mostly with missionaries, the idea stuck close to my mind; and so all the people whom I met in the street appeared to me like so many ministers fraught with high Christian purpose, and I could not but imagine myself as walking among the congregation of the First-born. It was only gradually, very gradually, that I unlearnt this childish notion.
Yes, Hebraism in one sense at least I found to be a common form of speech in America. First of all, everybody has a Hebrew name, and even horses are christened there. The words which we have never pronounced without the sense of extreme awe and reverence are upon the lips of workmen, carriage-drivers, shoe-blacks, and others of more exalted occupations. Every little offense is accompanied by a religious oath of some kind. In a hotel-parlor we asked a respectablelooking gentleman how he liked the new president-elect (Cleveland), and his emphatic answer was strongly Hebraic. ''By G — '' he said, ''I tell you he is a devil." The gentleman was afterward known to be a staunch Republican. We started in an emigrant train toward the East, and when the car stopped with a jerk so that we were almost thrown out of our seats, one of our fellow-passengers expressed his vexations with another
Hebraism, ''J Ch," and accompanied it with a stamping. And so forth. All these were of course utterly strange to our ears. Soon I was able to discover the deep profanit}^ that lay at the bottom of all these Hebraisms, and I took them as open violations of the Third Commandment, of whose special use and significance I had never been able to comprehend thus far, but now for the first time, was taught with 'living examples." So universal is the use of religious terms in every-day speech of the American people, that a story is told of a French immigrant who carried an English-French dictionary in his pocket, to w^hich he referred for every English word that he heard from the very beginning of his departure from Havre. On his landing at the Philadelphia wharf, the commonest word that he heard the people spoke was ''damn-devil." He at once went to his dictionary, but failing to find such a word therein, he threw it away, thinking that a diction- arj tliat did not contain so common a word must be of no further use to him in America.
The report that money was the almighty power in America was corroborated by many of our actual experiences. Immediately after our arrival at San Francisco, our faith in "Christian civilization" was severely tested by a disaster that befell one of our numbers. He was pick-pocketed of a purse that contained a five-dollar-gold piece! "Pick-pocket-ing in Christendom as in Pagandom," we cautioned to each other; and while in dismay and confusion we were consoling our robbed brother, an elderly lady, who afterward told us that she believed in the universal salvation of mankind, good as well as bad, took our misfortune heavily upon her heart, and warned us of further dangers, as pick-pocketing, burglarying, high-way-ing, and all other transgressions of sinful humanity were not unknown in her land as w ell. We did only wish, however, that that crank who despoiled us of that precious five-dollar-piece would never go to heaven.
But it was when we came to Chicago that mammonism in the highest spiritual sense was revealed to our vision. In the depot-restaurant, where, after four-days' jerking in an emigrant train, we refreshed ourselves with a piece each of cold chicken, with grateful remembrance of the Refresher of our souls, we were surrounded by a group of waiters whose black skin and wooly hair were the unmistakable signs of their Hamitic origin. On our bowing our heads before we partook of the gifts of the table, one of them patted our shoulders, and said, "you're gut men, you!" Upon our telling them of our faith (we believed in the literal sense of Matt. 10: 32), they told us that they were all Methodists, and took a great deal of interest in the universal spreading of God's Kingdom. 8oon there appeared another Hamite, who was introduced to us as the deacon of their church. He was very kind to us, heard with seeming interest what we told him of the advance of our mutual Faith in our land. We exchanged our good wishes and exhortations for the cause of our common Lord and Master. He attended upon us for full two hours, when the time for our departure came. He took all our valises upon his shoulders, followed us to the place where our tickets were examined — such was his care and attention for us. With courtesj^ and many thanks we extended our hands to take our goods to ourselves, to which our Methodist deacon objected; but stretching forth his dusky hand toward us, said, "Jist gib me somding." He had our valises in his custody, and only ''somding" could recover them from his hands. The engine-bell was ringing; it was not time to argue with him. Each of us dropped a 50-cent piece into his hand, our things were transferred to us, to a coach we hastened, and as the train began to move, we looked to each other in amazement, and said, ''Even charity is bartered here." Since then we never have trusted in the kind words of black deacons. One year after this, w^hen I was again robbed of my new silk-umbrella on a Fall River steamer, — whose superb ornamentation and exquisite music conve^^ed to me no idea whatever of the spirit of knavery that lurked underneath, — and so did once more liberate my heathen innocence, I felt the misfortune so keenly, that only once in my life I prayed for the damnation of that execrable devil, who could steal a shelter from a homeless stranger at the time of his dire necessity. Even the Chinese civilization of forty cen- turies ago could boast of a state of society when nobody picked up tilings dro^jped on tlie street. But liere upon Cliristian waters, in a floating palace, under the spell of the music of Handel and Mendelssohn, things were as unsafe as in a den of robbers.
Indeed, insecurity of things in Christendom is something to which we were wholly unaccustomed. Never have I seen more extensive use of keys than among these Christian people. We in our heathen homes have but very little recourse to keys. Our houses, most of them, are open to everybody. Cats come in and out at their own sweet pleasures, and men go to siesta in their beds with zephyrs blowing over their faces; and no apprehensions are felt of our servants or neighbors ever transgressing upon our possessions. But things are quite otherwise in Christendom. Not only are safes and trunks locked, but doors and windows of all descriptions, chests, drawers, iceboxes, sugar-vases, all. The housewife goes about her business with a bundle of keys jingling at her side; and a bachelor coming home in the evening has first to thrust his hand into his pocket to draw out a cluster of some twenty or thirty keys to find out one which will open to him his lonely cell. The house is locked from the frontdoor to the pin-box, as if the spirit of robbery pervaded every cubic-inch of the air. In our country we have this saying, uttered by the most suspicious of mankind, I suppose: "When you look at a light, think that it is a fire which can consume all your substances; when you look at a man, think that he is a robber who can rob you of all your possessions." But never have I seen this injunction put into practice in a more literal sense than in a well-locked American household. It is a miniature feudal castle modified to meet tlie prevailing cupidity of tlie age. Whether a civilization which requires cemented cellars and stonecut vaults, watched over by bull-dogs and battalions of policemen, could be called Christian is seriously doubted by honest heathens.
In no other respect, however, did Christendom appear to me more like heathendom than in a strong race prejudice still existing among its people. After a "century of dishonor," the coppercolored children of the forest from whom the land was wrested by many cruel and inhuman means, are still looked upon by the commonality as no better than buffaloes or Rocky Mountain sheep, to be trapped and hunted like wild beasts. As for ten millions of Hamites whom they originally imported from Africa, as they now import Devon bulls and Jersey cows, and just for the very same purpose, there was shown considerable sympathy and Christian brothership some thirty years ago; and beginning with John Brown, that righteous Saxon, 500,000 of the flower of the nation were to be butchered to atone for the iniquity of merchandising upon God's images. And though the^^ now have so condescended themselves as to ride in the same cars with the ''darkies," they still keep up their Japhetic vanity by keeping themselves at respectable distances from the race which they bought with their own blood. Down in the state of Delaware, whither I was once taken by a friend of mine as his guest, I was astonished to find a separate portion of a town given up wholly to negroes. Upon telling my friend that this making a sharp racial distinction appeared to me very Pagan-like, his emphatic answer was that he would rather be a Pagan and live separate from "nig- gers,'^ than be a Christian and live in the same quarters with them!
But strong and unchristian as their feeling is against the Indians and the Africans, the prejudice, the aversion, the repugnance, which thej entertain against the children of Sinim is something which we in heathendom have never seen the like. The land which sends over missionaries to China, to convert her sons and daughters to Christianity from the nonsense of Confucius and the superstitions of Buddha, — the very same land abhors even the shadow of a Chinaman cast upon its soil. There never was seen such an anomaly upon the face of this earth. Is Christian mission a child's play, a chivalry more puerile than that engaged the wit of Cervantes, that it should be sent to a people so much disliked by the people who send it?
The main reasons which make the Chinese so objectionable to the Christian Americans I understand to be three:
I. T/ie Chinese carry away all their savings to their home, and thus i?nJ>overish the land. — That is, that they might be acceptable to the Americans, they must spend up all they earned in America, and go home empty-handed. A strange doctrine this to hear from the people who inculcate the lessons of industry and provision upon themselves. 'Mil things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them." Do all the American and European merchants and savants and engineers who come to our shores, — do they leave all their earnings with us, and go home without bank-accounts in their favor? Do we not pay each one of them, 200, 300, 400, 500, 800 dollars a month in solid gold, scarcely a third of which he usually spends in our land, and goes away with the rest to buy ease and comforts in liis homeland? And yet we send them out with thanks, with presents of silk-robes and bronzevases, and oftentimes with imperial decorations and pensions affixed thereto. They did the service corresponding to the money we paid them (at least w^e suppose they did), and w^e do not think ourselves robbed by them. By what laws under heaven are the Chinese compelled to leave all their earnings in America after they have helped to cut a railroad through the Rocky Mountains, and planted and watered vineyards in California? Thev do not carry away gold for nothing, as selfstyled Christians sometimes did by directing muzzles of guns at the defenceless heathens, and kidnapping supple babies from the breasts of suckling mothers. The Chinamen leave the work behind them equivalent to the money they carry awav. The gold is not theirs by Nature's inherent iaw, and who art thou that deniest the sacred right of property to the sons of honest toil? J^e the ''pitiable heathens" send our foreign employes with honors and ceremonies, and they the ''blessed Christians" kick us out with derisive languages. Can these things be, O God of Vengeance!
2. These Chinese, with their stubborn adherence to their national ways and customs, bring indecencies upon the Christian covimunity. — True, pigtails and flowing pantaloons are not very decent things to be seen in the streets of Boston or >^ew York. But do you think corsets and compressed abdomens are fine things to see in the streets of Peking or Hankow? "But Chinese are filthy in their habits, and tricky in their dealings with others," you say. I wish I could show you some specimens of the noble Caucasian race roaming in the Eastern ports, who are as filthy, as stinkj, as putrefactive, as a poor pox-stricken Chinaman who is dungeoned by the San Francisco quarantine in a manner as if he had upset ten imperial thrones. As for the alleged moral obliquity of the Chinese: Have you ever heard of a Chinaman throwing a bombshell at city police, or disgracing the American womanhood in the mid-day sun? VThj not enact anti-German laws and anti-Italian laws as well if the social order and decency are your aim? What are the iniquities of the poor Chinamen that you persecute them with so much rigor, except they be their defencelessness and abject submission to your Gothic will? "Would that the iniquities of the Caucasian sojourners in our land were counted that they might be weighed over against those of Chinamen! If we had done to American or English citizens in our land half as much indignities as are done to the helpless Chinese in America, we would soon be visited with fleets of gunboats, and in the name of justice and humanity, would be compelled to pay 150,000 per capita for the lives of those worthless loafers, whose only w^orth as human beings consist in their having blue eyes and white skins, and in nothing more. Christendom seems to possess another Gospel, in addition to one preached by Paul and Cephas, which teaches among other detestable things this:
Might is Right, and Money is that Might.
J. T/ie Chinese by thcij' low wages do i7ijiiry to the America7i laborer. — This sounds more plausible than the other two reasons. It is "Protection" applied to the imported labor. I do not like to see any American household deprived of its chicken-pies on Sunday that a Chinaman might have a morsel more of his steamed rice. But let
America's national conscience ask this question of itself: Is 4,000,000 square miles of land flowing with milk and honey not wide enough for G5,- 000,000 of its people? Are there no spaces left in Idaho, Montana, and elsewhere, where the packed population of Canton and Foochow may be given opportunities of coping with buffaloes and grizzly bears to subdue the land for humankind? Where in God's Sacred Writings, or in Nature's fossiled tablets, can be found a statement that goes to prove an assumption that America must be possessed by the white race alone? Or if you like to be argued with without having your vanity touched in any way, you may be persuaded thus: Grudge to the poor Chinamen so much charity as the unpardoning Jew^s did to the heathen Gibeoniles; that is, make them "hewers of wood and drawers of water" to you, and you go to some more lordly occupations befitting your Teutonic or Celtic origin. Let them wash all your cuffs and collars and shirts for you; and they will serve you with lamblike meekness, and for half the price your own Caucasian laundrymen charge you. Or send them down into the Arizona or New Mexico mines to fetch from the bosom of infernal darkness the metal we prize so highly in day-light. A ''strike" is yet unknown among the poor heathens, unless some of you teach them how to do it. A class of laborers so meek, so uncomplaining, so industrious, and so cheap, you cannot find anywhere else under the sun.* That
* "I will admit that at one time I had fears of the Chiese overrunning this country, but for some years I have had none. * * * I do not know what we would do without them, and I undertake to say that they are the most quiet, industrious and altogether commendable class of foreigners who come here. 'Kiere is no other class so quick to learn and none so faithful." — Senator Stanford of California.
to so use them in a sphere of industry peculiarly their own is not only befitting your Christian profession, but profitable as well for your pockets, you have proved more than once by "smugglings of Chinamen" often enacted upon the Canadian frontiers. Why refuse to bless your fellowmen by ''policies" out of jealousies and rum-shops born? Why not believe in the Law of Prophets, and be kind and merciful to strangers, that the Lord of hosts may open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it? But as they now are, the whole tenor of anti-Chinese laws appears to me to be anti-Biblical, anti-Christian, anti-evangelical, and anti-humanitarian. Even the nonsense of Confucius teaches us very much better things than these.
It is perhaps hardly necessary for me to say that I am not a Chinaman myself. Though I am never ashamed of my racial relationship to that most ancient of nations, — that nation that gave Mencius and Confucius to the world, and invented the mariner's compass and printing machines centuries before the Europeans even dreamed of them, — yet to receive in my person all the indignities and asperities with which the poor coolies from Canton are goaded by the American populace, required nothing less than Christian forbearance to keep my head and heart in right order. Here again, American Hebraisms, which are applied even in the nomenclatures of horses, are made use of in the designations of the Chinese. They are all called "John," and even the kind policemen of the city of New York call us by that name. 'Tick up those Chinamen in," was the polite language of a Chicago coachman, to whom we paid the regular fare, and did nothing to hurt his vanity as a protege of St. Patrick. A well-clad gentleman sharing the same seat with me in a car asked me to have my comb to brush his grizzly beard; and instead of a thank which we in heathendom consider as appropriate upon such an occasion, he returned the comb, saying, ''Well, John, where do you keep your laundry shop?" An intelligent-looking gentleman asked us when we did cut our cues; and when told that we never had cues, ^^Why," he said, ''I thought all Chinamen have cues." That these very gentlemen, who seem to take peculiar delight in deriding our Mongolian origin, are themselves peculiarly sensitive as to their Saxon birthright, is well illustrated by the following little incident:
A group of young Japanese engineers went to examine the Brooklyn Bridge. When under the pier, the structure and tension of each of the suspending ropes w^ere being discussed upon, a silkhatted, spectacled, and decently dressed American gentleman approached them. "Well, John," he intruded upon the Japanese scientists, "these things must look awful strange to you from China, ey?" One among the Japanese retorted the insulting question, and said, "So they must be to you from Ireland." The gentleman got angry and said, "No, indeed not. I am not Irish." "And so we are not Chinese," was the gentle rejoinder. It was a good blow, and the silk-hatted sulked away. He did not like to be called an Irish.
Time fails me to speak of other unchristian features of Christendom. What about legalized lottery which can depend for its stability upon its millions in gold and silver, right in face of simple morality clear even to the understanding of a child; of widespread gambling propensities, as witnessed in scenes of cock-fights, horse-race, and foot-ball matches; of pugilism, more inhuman than Spanish bull-fights; of lynching, fitted more for Hottentots than for the people of a free Kepublic; of rum-trafiQc, whose magnitude can find no parallel in the trade of the whole world; of demagogism in politics; of denominational jealousies in religion; of capitalists' tyranny and laborers' insolence; of millionaires' fooleries; of men's hypocritical love toward their wives; etc., etc., etc.? Is this the civilization we were taught by missionaries to accept as an evidence of the superiority of Christian Religion over other religions? With what shamefacedness did they declare unto us that the religion which made Europe and America must surely be the religion from on high? If it was Christianity that made the socalled Christendom of to-day, let Heaven's eternal curse rest upon it! Peace is the last thing we can find in Christendom. Turmoils, complexities, insane asylums, penitentiaries, poor-houses!
O for the rest of the Morning Land, the quietude of the Lotus Pond! Not the steam whistle that alarms us from our disturbed sleep, but the carol of the Bird of Paradise that wakens us from our delicious slumber; not the dust and jar of an elevated railroad, but a palanquin borne by a lowing cow; not marble mansions built with price of blood earned in the Wall Street battle-market, but thatched roofs with sweet contentment in Nature's bounties. Are not sun, moon, and stars purer and more beautiful objects of worship than money and honors and empty shows?
O heaven, I am undone! I was deceived! I gave up what was really Peace for that which Is no Peace! To go back to my old faith I am now too overgrown; to acquiesce in my new faith is impossible. O for Blessed Ignorance that might have kept me from the knowledge of faith other than that which satisfied my good grandma! It made her industrious, patient, true; and not a compunction clouded her face as she drew her last breath. Hers was Peace and mine is Doubt; and woe is me that I called her an idolator, and pitied her superstition, and prayed for her soul, when I myself had launched upon an unfathomable abyss, tossed with fear and sin and doubt. One thing I shall never do in future: I shall never defend Christianity upon its being the religion of Europe and America. An "external evidence"' of this nature is not only weak, but actually vicious in its general effects. The religion that can support an immortal soul must have surer and profounder bases than such a ''show" evidence to rest upon. Yet I once built my faith upon a straw like that.