To such an extent has the successful violation of the treaty and the laws enacted for its execution progressed that the courts in the Pacific States have been for some time past overwhelmed by the examination of cases of Chinese laborers who are charged with having entered our ports under fraudulent certificates of return or seek to establish by perjury the claim of prior residence.

Such demonstration of the inoperative and inefficient condition of the treaty and law has produced deep-seated and increasing discontent among the people of the United States, and especially with those resident on the Pacific Coast.  This has induced me to omit no effort to find an effectual remedy for the evils complained of and to answer the earnest popular demand for the absolute exclusion of Chinese laborers having objects and purposes unlike our own and wholly disconnected with American citizenship.

Aided by the presence in this country of able and intelligent diplomatic and consular officers of the Chinese Government, and the representations made from time to time by our minister in China under the instructions of the Department of State, the actual condition of public sentiment and the status of affairs in the United States have been fully made known to the Government of China.

The necessity for remedy has been fully appreciated by that Government, and in August, 1886, our minister at Peking received from the Chinese foreign office a communication announcing that China, of her own accord, proposed to establish a system of strict and absolute prohibition of her laborers, under heavy penalties, from coming to the United States, and likewise to prohibit the return to the United States of any Chinese laborer who had at any time gone back to China, “in order” (in the words of the communication) “that the Chinese laborers may gradually be reduced in number and causes of danger averted and lives preserved.”

This view of the Chinese Government, so completely in harmony with that of the United States, was by my direction speedily formulated in a treaty draft between the two nations, embodying the propositions so presented by the Chinese foreign office.

The deliberations, frequent oral discussions, and correspondence on the general questions that ensued have been fully communicated by me to the Senate at the present session, and, as contained in Senate Executive Document O, parts 1 and 2, and in Senate Executive Document No. 272, may be properly referred to as containing a complete history of the transaction.

It is thus easy to learn how the joint desires and unequivocal mutual understanding of the two Governments were brought into articulated form in the treaty, which, after a mutual exhibition of plenary powers from the respective Governments, was signed and concluded by the plenipotentiaries of the United States and China at this capital on March 12 last.

Being submitted for the advice and consent of the Senate, its confirmation, on the 7th day of May last, was accompanied by two amendments which that body ingrafted upon it.