power of the nation? But such an alternative is not likely to be presented, and is sure to be averted by two simple rules:1

1. Let the General Government refrain from all further legislation or interference on behalf of the negro as such. If riots arise that the State authorities cannot quell, the National Government, duly invoked, should interfere, to preserve the public peace; and also, if necessary, it should use the arm of power to sustain the courts in putting down injustice, outrage, and wrong, by the arm of the law. But all this without making a point of caring for the negro in distinction from any other man; for the best way of caring for the negro is to cease to know him as a negro, and to treat him always and only as a man. Above all should the government refrain from legislating upon social customs, instincts, or prejudices. A legal injustice can be done away by law; a moral wrong, in the form of overt action, can be dealt with by law: but a taste, a sentiment, a feeling, an instinct, a prejudice, these pass the bounds of all legislation; and the attempt to rectify or regulate these by law serves only to irritate opposition. At these points human nature has much in common with the porcupine.

2. The black race should be taught that they are to depend upon themselves. Having freedom, schools, the rights of citizens guaranteed by the law, and the inducement to self-culture presented by opportunities of political action, they should be made to feel that their future is in their own hands; that, if they would rise to a position of respect and of responsibility as men, they must show themselves to be men. There is no other way for any race. If they cannot do this, they must go under. If they will not do this, they ought to go under. But no one who knows the negro race in America can doubt, that with time upon their side, and patience and justice toward them on the part of others, they will rise to the full measure of their opportunities, and, with their capacity for work, their docility, their kindliness, their adaptivity, their mirthfulness, their religious faith, will form as good a part as any in the social sytsem of the future. Time,

1 See paper, read at Glasgow, on the Question of Races.

patience, justice, will cause the friction of races to disappear in the working of the American system of harmonized humanity.

The Chinese, as yet, show little inclination to become naturalized as American citizens. Industrious, thrifty, clannish, they use America as a mine of gold to be worked for accumulations to be spent in that Celestial Empire where gold still passes current. If let alone, they are not likely to make war upon a society that opens to them so many avenues to industry and wealth. If they bring with them vices, the vicious must be dealt with as lawbreakers, not as Chinese. If they would practise immoralities in the name of religion, I will show presently how we should deal with these. But, as a race, they seem to exhibit no elements of danger that will not be overcome by education and usage.

So far as there is any race difficulty with the negroes and the Chinese, it does not originate with them, nor lie in their race qualities, but is created usually by the whites; and, leaving prejudice out of view, it has more to do with labor and politics than with color or nationality. For prejudice there is no remedy, save in the growth of Christian magnanimity over unreasoning instinct. The Jew is no longer locked up at night in his quarter in the Christian capitals of Europe, nor burnt for his gold; but who will quite trust the Turk to keep faith with his Christian subjects? What means the constant appendage to London advertisements for servants, "No Irish need apply"? Such antipathies come and go with change of times; and there is no remedy for them in laws or in philosophy. But race antipathies are appealed to in America to create political capital among the working-classes. Working-men hate competition in wages and skill, whether this arises from their own associates or from intruding foreigners. Trades-unions attempt to monopolize labor, and to deter any from working except upon their terms. Each class treads down that next beneath it. Hence, when Chinamen began to crowd into the labormarket of California, and, by living cheaply and working skilfully, to crowd upon the Germans and Irish already there, these resented this competition of labor by antipa

thies of race; and the stump politician was at hand to catch "the working-man's vote" by promising to prohibit Chinese immigration. He had been ready enough to have a small game with Ah Sin, and to pluck him with a "right bower;" but, finding that "bland and childlike" party could cover him with his sleeve, he at once rose to explain :

"Then I looked up at Nye,

And he gazed upon me;

And he rose with a sigh,

And said, Can this be?

We are ruined by Chinese cheap labor:'

And he went for that heathen Chinee."

Bret Harte's ridicule caused a sudden collapse in the anti-Chinese fanaticism of the hour. This, however, has since been revived with greater malignity and in more formidable proportions. The motive is given in the fact that more than fifty per cent of the voters in California are of foreign birth, chiefly Irish and German laborers; and thus the lower classes of European society come into competition with the lower classes of Asiatic society for the means of subsistence. If the Chinese were voters, some political party would begin to use them as an offset to the Irish and Germans, who now intimidate politicians into the policy of proscription. Yet what friend of free institutions would recommend the admission of these raw pagans to the polls? Cheap labor is not the sole condition of even material prosperity. The sense of justice will finally prevail; and, in all cases where the prejudice of race is used for a political game with labor, it needs only that law and public sentiment should protect every man in his right to earn his living; and the laws of trade will soon settle the status of competing races.

Quite different, however, and far more serious, are the difficulties created by a portion of the German immigration in the United States. These bad representatives of a good race would use their very training in knowledge, and their newly-acquired experience of freedom, to pervert the nationality of the American people, and overturn the foundations of morality and order on which their freedom rests. For the first, they demand, as a right of their

nationality and their numbers, that the German language be taught in the public schools, and provision made for teaching their own children all knowledge through the medium of the German tongue. If the demand were on the part of American parents that their children should be taught German as an accomplishment to the same extent that English and French are taught in public schools in Germany, this would be merely a question of expediency as to the form and extent of common-school training. But this is a demand of naturalized foreigners that the State shall assist them in bringing up their children as Germans, with all the fond associations of nationality that cluster about one's mother-tongue, with the feeling that Germany is their real fatherland, and America only their business factory; in a word, that the State shall make provision for perpetuating a distinct German nationality within the American Republic. The demand is presumptuous, disloyal, suicidal, such as no State could admit for a moment. Presumptuous; for what is Germany now doing, what must she do, in the provinces of Posen and Elsass, if she would there have loyal subjects in the next generation? She is compelling every child to learn German, and every official to speak and write German. In Strasburg she has even painted out the liquid French names of the streets, and substituted her own jaw-breaking gutturals. This is sound policy. If you would build up a nation loyal and true, you must begin at the foundation, and "out of the mouth of babes and sucklings must ordain strength, because of its enemies, and to still the enemy and the avenger." While the German nation is thus compelling all its members to be of one speech, is it not a pretty impertinence for Germans in the United States to demand that theirs shall be the language of the schools? As a specimen of this impertinence, take the following resolve of a meeting of Germans at Cooper Institute, New York:

"Whereas the German language is the natural idiom of a large portion of the population of the United States of America and of this metropolis, thus offering such additional practical advantages as would best recommend that language for adoption as a regular branch of instruction in our public schools,

"Resolved, That we, as citizens and tax-payers, most solemnly protest against any measures looking to the exclusion or curtailment of instruction in German in such of our schools where this study has already been established as a regular branch of instruction."

Could there be a greater peril to national unity and liberty than this scheme of fostering and perpetuating within the State a brood of children alien in tongue, in name, and in moral allegiance? This is disloyal also. In being naturalized, the foreigner swears "to renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to every foreign prince, potentate, state, and sovereignty whatever," and particularly to that of which he was born a subject. He should therefore in good faith identify himself with the interests of his adopted country as his own. As a man of honor, he cannot take this oath with mental reservations, nor hold a divided allegiance. In the event of war with Germany, non-naturalized Germans residing in the United States should be protected in person and property while remaining neutral; but the naturalized German must fight for America, or quit. No other rule is admissible. Now, the children of the naturalized citizen are native-born Americans; and it is the duty of the father to train them up in allegiance to American institutions. This used to be done when Germany was a country to run away from, and America a country for a refuge and a home; but, now that Germany is a very good country to come back to with the spoils of American trade, there is a class of naturalized Germans who would bring up their children with Germany in view as their home, using their American citizenship only as a protection against military service, - a speculation in disloyalty that both nations should frown upon.

Further: the policy of using the public schools for training the children of foreigners to perpetuate a foreign speech as a symbol and bond of foreign nationality would be suicidal. If done for the Germans, this must be done by and by for the Chinese; for the Mexicans who may join. us; for the Icelanders, if they shall emigrate to their newlyfound paradise of Alaska: in short, Americans must cease to be an harmonious, unified people, and degenerate into