by labor brokers, who hire them for a stipulated employinent, price, and term, and contract their service thus procured to employers here. These employers know only the brokers, so far as the pay is concerned. The laborer, also, looks only to them for his stipulated wages. They come ignorant and indifferent where their service is to be rendered; careful only to get the remuneration, and to be returned dead or alive to their paternal home. Perhaps one in fifty is thus returned to his family only as a corpse, with the portion of the hire he has lived to earn. Chiefly laborers, and pressed at home with unendurable poverty, they are yet, as we are assured on credible testimony, universally educated, so as to be able to read and write in their own language. As one studies their faces while they sit by fifties or hundreds on the construction platform car of the railroad waiting for the passenger train to pass, one remarks at once a degree of intelligence decidedly above that of like laborers on eastern works. Quiet, patient, docile, courteous, they are yet cheerful and quick to take a joke and show a fondness for inoffensive sport and amusement. With less of muscle, they are lithe, and ready, and persistent, and so are acceptable and profitable as laborers beyond most others. More recently a higher class have joined in the immigration. Merchants of a high order, with large commercial experience and skill, and representing large wealth, have established themselves in the Pacific cities. The Chinese are eminently a commercial people, enterprising, sagacious, and commercially upright. Some of them in San Francisco stand among the foremost in all the qualities that fill out our ideal of an accomplished trader.

The United States law of February 19th, 1862, humanely protects, so far, perhaps, as legislation can, against the atrocities which have characterized the Coolie traffic to Peru, the Chincha Islands, and Cuba. While permitting free, voluntary migration, it prohibits, under heavy penalties, the importation of Chinese laborers without certificate of the free assent of each immigrant given to an American consul. If corruption on the part of the American officer in China can be effectually prevented, it is very questionable whether any further attempt at protection of this kind can be made which will not violate

fundamental principies of personal liberty, and of commercial freedom.*

It is understood that contracts for laborers in large numbers, as for instance it is said five thousand for service in South Carolina, five thousand for Louisiana, have been made and are still in negotiation with prospect of indefinite increase. While our domestic legislation should solicitously protect against any abuses to which this vast system of hired labor may be liable, it is difficult to see how the negotiations for its introduction on a large scale and by professional middle-men offend against morality or philanthropy. As for the treatment to which they shall be subject when here, the same policy and the same means will obviously be required which the condition of the freedmen and of the Indians have demanded.

It is well known that the Chinese have been subjected to outrages in the Pacific States in legislation, in judicial administration, in society, paralleled only by those endured by negroes and Indians in the more Eastern States. But a change for the better is now recognized. The fourteenth amendment to the federal constitution has annulled the State legislation which excluded the Chinese from giving testimony; and now "the equal protection of law" is guaranteed to every person of whatever race or color, and no State "can deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law" but in violation of this most just, most humane, and most timely ordinance of the national will. The working of the fifteenth amendment when adopted will still further tend to the complete elevation of these oppressed races within our territory to an equal participation in all our civil and political rights and privileges. The influx of men of high social standing, men of intelligence, culture, wealth, is fast turning contempt into respect; and interest too is dictating a more humane and liberal policy. The brutal treatment dealt out to the Chinese heretofore has worked, we think, as a happy providential check to a too rapid immigration. This check re

* We notice that Senator Williams has introduced a bill into the United States Senate, prohibiting all importations of Chinese under contracts of service. There is danger in such legislation of trespassing on higher principles.

moved, we may assuredly expect that the immigration will be greatly increased. It is difficult indeed to imagine a limit to the extent of this movement. China can easily spare, without disadvantage, tens of millions of its crowded population within the next decade. With assurance of employment and protection, and with provision of means of transportation, such a flood of immigration would be by no means improbable. But the same providential control, which has so conspicuously determined the past in reference to the time and extent of the migration will, beyond a doubt, still shape this movement as to mode and degree to the best results. This fact, however, we do well to set distinctly before our view, that the floodgates to a well nigh measureless heathen migration are opened upon us. Only the want of facilities of transportation and of means of subsistence can reasonably be expected to check or confine it. It is too late in human history to think of prohibitory legislation; and prevention by social abuse the Christianity of our day will not allow. Of these four or five hundred millions of pinched and famished and uneasy people, is it extravagant to suppose that a number equivalent to a fourth or a tenth of its annual increase should avail themselves of an outlet and a proffered home of abundance? The Chinese, let it be borne in mind, have little notion of nationality, little love of country; they are still in the patriarchal, tribal stage of development. Family ties are the dominant ones. When homes can be established in America to which ancestral remains can be securely gathered, and about which capabilities can be easily acquired for settling the natural family increase, and the characteristic passion and ambition of the Chinese are thus promised fullest gratification, the check to migration will not be from behind. Ships in plenty, means to pay the passage charges, open and inviting domiciles here,-in the want of these must be found the chief or only hindrances. Koopmanschaaps enough will rise up to supply these wants just so fast as the brokerage will pay; just so fast in other words as the demand for labor of the kind and cost which this supply furnishes shall manifest itself in this country. And this brings us to the consideration of the first of these several problems which this epoch in our history is presenting to us,

and which we wish in the conclusion of this Article to suggest, in order that the reflecting and considerate philanthropist and Christian may more intelligently interpret the particular facts bearing on this subject, which the immediate future will from day to day and from month to month reveal to us.

The first of these problems, a fundamental one in some respects, is the industrial or economical problem. The fitness of the Chinese to meet our industrial wants, the extent of these wants, and the checks against an over-supply-against a pernicious glut in the market-are the three points of leading importance in the solution of this problem.

The Chinese, then, are in general well fitted to meet our present industrial condition. They have been proved to be admirably fitted to the lighter labor of the household,—neat, trustworthy, ready, proverbially economical, careful of their employers' interest as of their own,-in short, the very best class of domestics. They have been proved to be efficient laborers in the heavy work of constructing and repairing railroads, of sinking mines, and clearing forests, equal to any heavy labor that should be put on human shoulders. The construction of the Pacific railroad has shown their superiority here to those of any other nation. In mining too, the patient, economical, persistent Chinaman works out large returns from mines which the unstable, wasteful, impatient white quits in desperate disgust. In agricultural employments, they bring an experience, with their capacity for manual labor, that promises the best results in general tillage, by their economy of manures, and their careful attention to the details of culture as varied by the season, atmospheric changes, and vegetable growth; and in the special production of silk, of tea, and of the smaller fruits. The introduction of Chinese husbandry into our agricultural pursuits can hardly fail of great advantage. In factories, they have been found to be equally desirable, rendering enterprises that were just failing from unproductiveness, profitable and successful. As clerks, also, in all the diversities of commercial and financial industry they have been proved to be accurate, attentive, quick, and faithful.

The existing demands for labor in our country can hardly be over-estimated, even if regarded in the same light in which the all-wise providence of God seems to have viewed this whole matter of the settlement of our western world, that may seem to us so tardy. There are wants that are felt to be immediately pressing; and this felt pressure is the providential monition that the time for supplying it has come. Labor generally on the Pacific coast is enormously high, and out of all proportion to prices in other parts of the country, and especially other parts of the world. Domestic labor in San Francisco receives several times the amount of compensation yielded it in the Atlantic cities. So labor in the field, in mines, or railroads, in factories, is most disproportinately expensive. The fact shows a scarcity; it is a providential call for supply. Then there is a continent to be subdued to man. A belt extending across the entire breadth of our country from North to South for near a thousand miles beyond the still unoccupied lands of the great Missouri valley, remains a sterile wilderness yet to be reclaimed to the occupancy and improvement of man. The Mormon migration, which itself is to be reckoned among the remarkable providences of the times, has shown at once how practicable and how desirable it is that all those now barren plains within the reach of irrigation and with a temperature favorable for vegetation should be entered by the patient, inexpensive, persistent labor of a Chinaman. All along the ranges of mountains that bound on the East and on the West these immense plains reaching from the Mexican to the British possessions, are inexhaustible deposits of the precious and of the baser metals requiring to be taken out and refined for use. These valleys also are to be traversed by railways. Here are three different fields well nigh limitless in extent, now open and calling for cultivation which none but foreign labor can enter and fill. Then there are the lesser fields, yet immense, open to labor from abroad, and clamorously seeking it in our Southern plantations and our Western valleys. The providentially ordained equilibrium of labor is far from being reached; and there must be movement till it is fully established.