no redress unless an American is witness to the deed, and comes in with the law to their relief; and that their oath ought to be allowed in legal tribunals, at least so far that a jury or court might, if it judged best, receive their testimony. I am strongly of opinion that the opposition to the Chinese arises from prejudice, and not from their interfering with any American interests, and is almost entirely confined to the unproducing class in our country-to gamblers, loafers, liquor-dealers, etc." Other testimonies would but serve to sustain the above. They corroborate the views which I have presented in this chapter.

I have not considered this subject now in its higher civil and moral relations. But this much is evident, that, looking at the advent of the Chinese race in the New World in the light of an accession to the sum of the physical labor which is necessary to meet our agricultural, manufacturing, domestic and other wants, both its characteristics and the partial experience of those who have tested it upon our Pacific coast show that it must be regarded as a great, opportune and valuable national benefit.

THE

CHAPTER XVIII.

POPULAR GOVERNMENT IN CHINA.

HE sentiments of Americans with regard to China have hitherto been principally formed by the writings of men born and educated under monarchical institutions. The earliest and the most abundant productions which have made us acquainted with that remote and exclusive empire have been those of the Jesuits, Lazarists, Dominicans, Franciscans and priests of other Roman Catholic orders, who began vigorously to attempt the conversion of its people to their system of Christianity more than three centuries ago. The French, German and other authors who have described China have been chiefly indebted to the narratives, reports and histories of these men, which have been numerous, full and well written, for their facts and the conclusions from them. But these priests fear and hate popular liberty. "No means must be omitted," said Pope Clement XIII., "to exterminate the fatal pest, which spreads through so many works." We know how the late Gregory XVI. was infuriated by "that pest of all others most to be dreaded in a state-unbridled liberty of opinion"— "that worst and never sufficiently to be execrated and detestable liberty of the press, for the diffusion of all manner of writings." The principles, the desires, the

interests of these men all disposed them to magnify the majesty, the authority, the wealth, the extent of tle imperial power. They slavishly courted it in China; they magnified it in Europe. They dread the power of the people in China, as we have the evidence they do in America. There is little for Americans to learn from their books as to what exists of it in China.

The other chief source of American knowledge has been the books written by servants of the British government, or by British travelers or missionaries. There is much that is valuable in them. Yet two fatal influences corrupt most of their conceptions of the Chinese political system. The first is that of their previous monarchical ideas. The second is that of the immense stake which Great Britain has in the opium traffic. The national conscience and judgment are perverted, so far as justice to the Chinese is concerned, by the one fact that Great Britain supports her Indian government, enriches multitudes of her subjects and preserves the control of Oriental commerce, by the cultivation in India and annual sale to China of fifty millions of dollars' worth of opium. These people dare not consider the virtues of the innocent family whom they are robbing, and whose house they are burning over their heads.

Now that China is brought to be our nearest neighbor on the west and her interests and ours are so much identified, we must examine her institutions for ourselves, and from a new position.

A fairer estimate of the Chinese will take the place, on the one extreme, of the blunders or misrepresentations as to her political character which held up their empire as a model government; and on the other extreme of the

mistake and folly of those as to her moral character which painted her people as the most vicious or sensual of the heathen. A letter was published some years ago from Dr. S. Wells Williams, the Chinese Secretary to the American Legation at Peking, and author of the work entitled "The Middle Kingdom," in which he says: "The Chinese race has, perhaps, risen as high as is possible in the two great objects of human government-security of life and property to the governed, and freedom of action under the individual restraints of law."1 The object of this chapter is to exhibit them in such a light, as the deduction from the writer's experience among them in their own country and in California.

There are few nations of the world among whom the freedom of the people is more large, more squarely founded upon their intelligence, or more carefully guarded against despotism, than it is in China.

To those who are acquainted with the history of mankind this will not seem strange. For though it flatters our national vanity to assume representative forms to be the pleasant fruit of bitter seed and of long and painful cultivation, yet this is not the truth. The first state of men in society is one of political equality. The first natural advance toward its organization is their election to authority of those most capable of protecting them and punishing the vicious. Where society has remained most peaceful and unchanged we may expect to find its original institutions less disturbed. The dispersion of great families, interferences with regular occupations, long migrations, wars, changes of circumstances, tend to break them up. The planting of mankind upon a new

1 New York Observer.

hemisphere is like a new creation, in which a small number of individuals, compelled to meet the first necessities of existence, return to the primitive ideas of government.

To men, therefore, who are informed as to the past history of the nations of the earth and as to their present relative condition, it will seem credible that the oldest and most unchanged of them should not be so different as many believe from the newest of them, which has revolutionized the forms whose tyranny drove its founders beyond their reach to another hemisphere; that China should be the freest nation of the East, as the United States is of the West. Nor will it seem improbable that the notions which many entertain of the Chinese, which are gathered from the writings of Europeans as prejudiced against the one as they are against the other, and indeed very ignorant of the real condition and spirit of either, or else formed from the partial and superficial observations of some of our own people, should prove to be mistaken and unjust.

The classical student will see the force of this when he remembers the political system of ancient Rome-an empire whose history has some remarkable points of analogy to that of China. Beneath the monarchical rule, which became more and more strong until the popular liberty was at last crushed by it, there rise constantly to view institutions which display the power of the people. Thus the "tribes"1 held their separate regular assemblies; they elected officers who at length came

1 The English word "tribe" comes indeed from the Latin tribus, signifying originally one of the three clans, the Ramnes, the Tities and the Luceres, which at an early period embraced in one or the other of them the whole of the people.