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.

ARTICLE 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.

ARTICLE 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