DESPISED RACES
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.
