Our exclusion of the Chinese, which came up in the spring of 1886, when an Ambassador from China was roughly handled in San Francisco, was a disgrace to our own instincts of liberty.  A great many people did not want them because they did not like the way they dressed.  They objected to the Chinaman’s queue.  George Washington wore one, so did Benjamin Franklin and John Hancock.  The Chinese dress was not worse than some American clothes I have seen.  Some may remember the crinoline monstrosities of ’65, as I do—­the coal-scuttle bonnets, the silver knee-buckles!  The headgear of the fair sex has never ceased to be a mystery and a shock during all my lifetime.  I remember being asked by a lady-reporter in Brooklyn if I thought ladies should remove their hats in the theatre, and I told her to tell them to keep them on, because in obstructing the stage they were accomplishing something worth while.  Any fine afternoon the spring fashions of 1886, displayed in Madison Square between two and four o’clock, were absurdities of costume that eclipsed anything then worn by the Chinese.

The Joss House of the Chinese was entitled to as much respect in the United States, under the constitution, as the Roman Catholic church, or the Quaker Meeting house, or any other religious temple.  A new path was made for the Chinese into America via Mexico, when 600,000 were to be imported for work on Mexican territory.  In the discussion it aroused it was urged that Mexico ought to be blocked because the Chinese would not spend their money in America.  In one year, in San Francisco, the Chinese paid $2,400,000 in rent for residences and warehouses.  Our higher civilisation was already threatened with that style of man who spends three times more money than he makes, and yet we did not want the thrifty unassuming religious Chinaman to counteract our mania for extravagance.  This entire agitation emanated from corrupt politics.  The Republican and Democratic parties both wanted the electoral votes of California in the forthcoming Presidential election, and, in order to get that vote, it was necessary to oppose the Chinese.  Whenever these Asiatic men obtain equal suffrage in America the Republican party will fondle them, and the Democrats will try to prove that they always had a deep affection for them, and some of the political bosses will go around with an opium pipe sticking out of their pockets and their hair coiled into a suggestion of a queue.

The ship of state was in an awful mess.  No sooner was the good man in power than politics struggled to pull him down to make room for the knaves.  When Thomas Jefferson was inaugurated, the Sentinel of Boston wrote the obituary of the American nation.  I quote it as a literary scrap of the past: 

“Monumental inscription—­expired yesterday, regretted by all good men, the federal administration of the government of the united states, aged 12 years.  This Monumental Inscription to the virtues and the services of the deceased is raised by the Sentinel of Boston.”