The Treaty With China, its Provisions Explained

ART. 6. Citizens of the United States visiting or residing in China shall enjoy the same privileges, immunities, or exemptions in respect to travel or residence as may there be enjoyed by the citizens or subjects of the most favored nation; and, reciprocally, Chinese subjects visiting or residing in the United States shall enjoy the same privileges, immunities and exemptions in respect to travel or residence as may be enjoyed by the citizens or subjects of the most favored nation; but nothing herein contained shall be held to confer naturalization upon the citizens of the United States in China, nor upon the subjects of China in the United States.

There will be weeping, and wailing, and gnashing of teeth on the Pacific coast when Article 6 is read. For, at one sweep, all the crippling, intolerant, and unconstitutional laws framed by California against Chinamen pass away, and discover (in stage parlance) 20,000 prospective Hong Kong and Suchow voters and office-holders! Tableau. I am not fond of Chinamen, but I am still less fond of seeing them wronged and abused. If the reader has not lived in San Francisco, he can have only a very faint conception of the tremendous significance of this mild-looking, unpretentious Article 6. It lifts a degraded, snubbed, vilified, and hated race of men out of the mud and invests them with the purple of American sovereignty. It makes men out of beasts of burden. The first iniquity it strikes at is that same revolutionary one of taxation without representation. In California the law imposes a burdensome mining tax upon Chinamen--a tax which is peculiar in its nature and is not imposed upon any other miners, either native or foreign--and the legislature that created this rascality knew the law was in flagrant violation of the constitution when they passed it. Mr. Cushing, a great lawyer, and formerly minister to China, says that nearly all the Pacific coast laws relating to Chinamen are unconstitutional and could not stand in a court at all. The Chinese mining tax has been collected with merciless faithfulness for many years--often two or three times, instead of once--but its collection will have to be discontinued now. Treaties of the United States override the handiwork of even the most gifted of State legislatures. In San Francisco if a Chinaman enters a street car to ride with the Negroes and the Indians and the other gentlemen and ladies, the magnificent conductor instantly ejects him, with all the insolence that $75 a month and official importance of microscopic dimensions confer upon small people. The Chinaman may ride on the front platform, but not elsewhere. Hereafter, under the ample shadow of Article 6, he may ride where he pleases. Chinamen, the best gardeners in America, own no gardens. The laws of California do not allow them to acquire property in real estate. Article 6 does, though. Formerly, in the police court, they swore Chinamen according to the usual form, and sometimes, where the magistrate was particularly anxious to come at the truth, a chicken was beheaded in open court and some yellow paper burned with awful solemnity while the oath was administered--but the Chinaman testified only against his own countrymen. Things are changed now, however, and he may testify against whom he pleases. No one ever saw a Chinaman on a jury on the Pacific coast. Hereafter they will be seen on juries, sitting in judgment upon the crimes of men of all nationalities. Chinamen have taken no part in elections, heretofore, further than to sweep out the balloting stations, but the time is near at hand when they will vote themselves; when they will be clerks and judges of election, and receive and account for the votes of white men; when they will be eligible to office and may run for Congress, if such be the will of God. We have seen caricatures in San Francisco representing a white man asking a Chinaman for his vote. It was fine irony then, but in a very little while the same old lithograph, resurrected, will have as much point as it ever had, only the subject of it will have become a solemn reality instead of an ingenious flight of fancy. In that day, candidates will have to possess other accomplishments besides being able to drink lager beer and twirl a shillalah. They will have to smoke opium and eat with chop-sticks. Influential additions will have to be made to election tickets and transparencies, thus: “THE COUNTRY'S HOPE, THE PEOPLE'S CHOICE--DONNERWETTER, O'SHAUGHNESSY, AND CHING-FOO” The children of Chinese citizens will have the entry of the public schools on the same footing as white children. Any one who is not blind, can see that the first ninety words of Article 6 work a miracle which shames the most dazzling achievements of him of the wonderful lamp. I am speaking as if I believed the Chinamen would hasten to take out naturalization papers under this treaty and become citizens. I do believe it. They are shrewd and smart, and quick to see an advantage; that is one argument. If they have any scruples about becoming citizens, the politicians who need their votes will soon change their opinions. Article 6 does not confer citizenship upon Chinamen--we have other laws which regulate that matter. It simply gives them the privileges and immunities pertaining to “residence,” in the same degree as they are enjoyed by the “subjects of the most favored nation.” One of the chief privileges pertaining to “residence” among us is that of taking the oath and becoming full citizens after that residence has been extended to the legal and customary period. Mr. Cushing says the Chinamen had a right to become citizens before Article 6 was framed. They certainly have it now. Prominent senators refused to touch the treaty or have anything to do with it unless it threw the doors of citizenship open as freely to Chinamen as to other foreigners. The entire Senate knew the broadest meaning of Article 6--and voted for it. The closing sentence of it was added to please a certain Senator, and then he was satisfied and supported the treaty with all his might. It was a gratification to him to have that sentence added; and inasmuch as the sentence could do no harm, since it don't mean anything whatever under the sun, it was gratefully and cheerfully added. It could not have been added to please a worthier man. It sets off the treaty, too, because it is so gracefully worded and is so essentially and particularly ornamental. It embellishes and supports the grand edifice of the Chinese treaty, even as a wealth of stucco embellishes and supports a stately temple. It would hardly be worth while for a treaty to confer naturalization in the last clause of an article wherein it had already provided for the acquirement of naturalization by the proper and usual course. The idea of making negroes citizens of the United States was startling and disagreeable to me, but I have become reconciled to it; and being reconciled to it, and the ice being broken and the principle established, I am now ready for all comers. The idea of seeing a Chinaman a citizen of the United States would have been almost appalling to me a few years ago, but I suppose I can live through it now. Maybe it will be well to say what sort of people these prospective voters are. There are 50,000 of them on the Pacific coast at large, and 15,000 or 20,000 in San Francisco. They occupy a quarter just out of the business center of the city. They worship a hideous idol in a gorgeous temple. They have a theater, where the orchestra sit on the stage (drinking tea occasionally,) and deafening the public with a ceaseless din of gongs, cymbals, and fiddles with two strings, whose harmonies are capable of inflicting exquisite torture. Their theatrical dresses are much finer and more costly than those in the Black Crook, and the immorality of their plays is fully up to the Black Crook standard. Consequently they are ruined people. Their prominent instinct being just like ours, let us extend the right-hand of fellowship to them across the sea. Some of the men gamble, and the standing of the women is not good. The Chinese streets of San Francisco are crowded with shops and stalls mostly, but there are many Chinese merchant princes who do business on a large scale. The remittances of coin to China amount to half a million a month. Chinamen work hard and with tireless perseverance; other foreigners get out of work, and labor exchanges must look out for them. Chinamen look out for themselves, and are never idle a week at a time; they make excellent cooks, washers, ironers, and house servants; they are never seen drunk; they are quiet, orderly, and peaceable, by nature; they possess the rare and probably peculiarly barbarous faculty of minding their own business. They are as thrifty as Holland Dutch. They permit nothing to go to waste. When they kill an animal for food, they find use for its hoofs, hide, bones, entrails--everything. When other people throw away fruit cans they pick them up, heat them, and secure the melted tin and solder. They do not scorn refuse rags, paper, and broken glass. They can make a blooming garden out of a sand-pile, for they seem to know how to make manure out of everything which other people waste. As I have said before, they are remarkably quick and intelligent, and they can all read, write, and cipher. They are of an exceedingly observant and inquiring disposition. I have been describing the lowest class of Chinamen. Do not they compare favorably with the mass of other immigrants? Will they not make good citizens? Are they not able to confer a sound and solid prosperity upon a State? What makes a sounder prosperity or invites and unshackles capital more surely than good, cheap, reliable labor? California and Oregon are vast, uncultivated grain fields. I am enabled to state this in the face of the fact that California yields twenty million bushels of wheat this year! California and Oregon will fill up with Chinamen, and these grain fields will be cultivated up to their highest capacity. In time, some of them will be owned by Chinamen, inasmuch as the treaty gives them the right to own real estate. The very men on the Pacific coast who will be loudest in their abuse of the treaty will be among those most benefited by it--the day-laborers. The Chinamen, able to work for half wages, will take their rough manual labor off the hands of these white men, and then the whites will rise to the worthier and more lucrative employment of superintending the Chinamen, and doing various other kinds of brain-work demanded of them by the new order of things. Through the operation of this notable Article 6, America becomes at once as liberal and as free a country as England--therefore let me rejoice. Singapore is a British colony. There are 16,000 Chinese there, and they are all British subjects--British citizens in the widest meaning of the term. They have all the rights and privileges enjoyed by Englishmen. They hold office. One Chinaman there is a magistrate, and administers British law for British subjects. A Chinaman resident for three or four years in England, and possessing a certain amount of property, can become naturalized and vote, hold office, and exercise all the functions and enjoy all the privileges of citizens by birth.

ART. 7. Citizens of the United States shall enjoy all the privileges of the public educational institutions under the control of the Government of China, and reciprocally Chinese subjects shall enjoy all the privileges of the public educational institutions under the control of the Government of the United States which are enjoyed in the respective countries by the citizens or subjects of the most favored nations. The citizens of the United States may freely establish and maintain schools within the Empire of China at those places where foreigners are by treaty permitted to reside, and reciprocally Chinese subjects may enjoy the same privileges and immunities in the United States.

Article 7 explains itself.

ART. 8. The United States, always disclaiming and discouraging all practices of unnecessary dictation and intervention by one nation in the affairs or domestic administration of another, do hereby freely disclaim any intention or right to intervene in the domestic administration of China in regard to the construction of railroads, telegraphs, or other material internal improvements. On the other hand, His majesty and the Emperor of China reserves to himself the right to decide the time, and manner, and circumstances of introducing such improvements within his dominions. With this mutual understanding it is agreed by the contracting parties that if at any time hereafter His Imperial Majesty shall determine to construct or cause to be constructed works of the character mentioned within the Empire, and shall make application to the United States or any other Western power for facilities to carry out that policy, the United States will, in that case, designate and authorize suitable engineers to be employed by the Chinese Government, and will recommend to other nations an equal compliance with such application, the Chinese Government in that case protecting such engineers in their persons and property, and paying them a reasonable compensation for their service.

Article 8 looks entirely unnecessary at a first glance. Yet to China--and afterward to the world at large--it is perhaps the most important article in the whole treaty. It aims at restoring Chinese confidence in foreigners, and will go far toward accomplishing it. Until that is done, only the drippings (they amount to millions annually) of the vast fountains of Eastern wealth can be caught by the Western nations. I have before spoken of an arrogant class of foreigners in China who demand of the Government the building of railways and telegraphs, and who assume to regulate and give law to the customs of trade, almost in open defiance of the constituted authorities. Their menacing attitude and their threatening language frighten the Chinese, who know so well the resistless power of the Western nations. They look upon these things with suspicion. They want railways and telegraphs, but they fear to put these engines of power into the hands of strangers without a guaranty that they will not be used for their own oppression, possibly their destruction. Even as it is now, foreigners can go into the interior and commit wrongs upon the people with impunity, for their “extra territorial” privileges leave them answerable only to their own laws, administered upon their own domain or “concessions.” These “concessions” being far from the scene of the crime, it does not pay to send witnesses such distances, and so the wrong goes untried and unpunished. There are other obstacles to the immediate construction of the demanded internal improvements--among them the inherent prejudice of the untaught mass of the common people against innovation. It is sad to reflect that in this respect the ignorant Chinese are strangely like ourselves and other civilized peoples. Unfortunately, the very day that the first message passed over the first telegraph erected in China, a man died of cholera at one end of the line. The superstitious people cried out that the white man's mysterious machine had destroyed the “good luck” of the district. The telegraph had to be taken down, otherwise the exasperated people would have done it themselves. How precisely like our civilized, Christianized, enlightened selves these Chinese “men and brethren” are! The farmers of great Massachusetts turned out en masse, armed with axes, and resisted the laying of the first railroad track in that State. Thirty years ago, the concentrated wisdom of France, in National Assembly convened, gravely pronounced railroads a “foolish, unrealizable toy.” In Tuscany, the people rose in their might and swore there should be bloodshed before a railroad track should be laid on their soil. Their reason was exactly the same as that offered by the Chinese--they said it would destroy the “good luck” of the country. Let us be lenient with the little absurd peculiarities of the Chinese, for manifestly these people are our own blood relations. Let us look charitably now upon a certain very serious obstacle which lies in the way of their sudden acceptance of a great railroad system. Let us remember that China is one colossal graveyard--a mighty empire so knobbed all over with graves that the level spaces left are hardly more than alleys and avenues among the clustering death-mounds. Animals graze upon the grass-clad graves (for all things are made useful in China), and the spaces between are carefully and industriously cultivated. These graves are as precious as their own blood to the Chinese, for they worship their dead as ancestors. The first railroad that plows its pitiless way through these myriads of sacred hillocks will carry dismay and distress into countless households. The railways must be built, though. We respect the griefs of the poor country people, but still the railways must be built. They will tear heartstrings out by the roots, but they lead to the sources of unimaginable wealth, and they must be built. These old prejudices must and can be eradicated--just as they were in Massachusetts. With such encouragement from foreigners, and such guaranties of good will and just intent as Article 8 offers by simply agreeing that China may transact her own private business unmolested by meddlesome interference, the Emperor will cheerfully begin to open up his country with roads and telegraphs. It seems a simple thing and an easy one to accord to a man such manifest and indisputable rights, but beyond all doubt this assurance is what China craves most. Article 8, indorsed by all the Western powers, would unlock the riches of 400,000,000 of Chinese subjects to the world. Hence, to all parties concerned, it is perhaps, the important clause of the treaty. That China is anxious to build railways is shown in the fact that by the latest news from there, just officially enunciated to our State Department, it appears that the Viceroy of the three chief provinces of the Empire is about to begin a railroad from Suchow to Shanghai--80 miles--or, at least, has the project under serious consideration. The new treaty with America will tend to strengthen and encourage him in his design.

This is the broadest, most unselfish, and most catholic treaty yet framed by man, perhaps. There is nothing mean, or exacting, or unworthy in any of its provisions. It freely offers every privilege, every benefit, and every concession the most grasping suitor could demand, to a nation accustomed for generations to understand a “treaty” as being a contrivance whose province was to extort as many “advantages” as possible and give as few as possible in return. The only “advantage” to the United States perceptible on the face of the document, perhaps, is the advantage of having dealt justly and generously by a neighbor and done it in a cordial spirit. It is something to have done right--a species of sentiment seldom considered in treaties. In ratifying this treaty the Senate of the United States did themselves high credit, and all the more so that they did it with such alacrity and such heartiness. This is a treaty with no specific advantages noted in it; it is simply the first great step toward throwing all China open to the world, by showing toward her a spirit which invites her esteem and her confidence instead of her customary curses. There is nothing in it about China ceding to us the navigation of an ocean in return for the navigation of a creek; nor the monopoly of silk for a monopoly of beeswax; nor a whaling-ground in return for a sardine-fishery. Yet it is a treaty which is full of “advantages.” It is more full of them than is any other treaty, but they are meted out with an even hand to all--to China upon the one hand, and to the world upon the other. It looks to the opening up, in China, of a vast and lucrative commerce with the world, and of which America will have only her just share, nothing more. It looks to the lifting up of a mighty nation and conferring upon it the boon of a purer religion and of a higher and better civilization than it has known before. It is a treaty made in the broad interests of justice, enlightenment, and progress, and therefore it must stand. It bridges the Pacific, it breaks down the Tartar wall, it inspires with fresh young blood the energies of the most venerable of the nations. It acquires a grand field for capital, labor, research, enterprise--confers science, mechanics, social and political advancement, Christianity. Is it not enough?