Heretofore we have had vast bodies of the finest agricultural lands in the world which needed the hand of labor and the arm of muscle to develop and to reduce to cul21.38 tivation. These lands. if not wholly taken up and occupied. are now on the verge of being exhausted. and the fact confronts its that the Government has now comparatively no lands for the landless or homes for the homeless. We have not lands sufficient to make an ordinary county of good arable land in all the vast domains of the Government to which we can invite the refugee from European oppression and from the burdens of depressing taxation. Wherever such lands are found they are already possessed by grasping monopolies. and the water. which alone gives them any value. is preempted by overgrown capital or the agents of speculating corporations. It is not my purpose to enter into any detail on this subject. but merely to state a fact which is undeniable and susceptible of abundant proof. and to suggest that. if for no other reason than this. the time has arrived when we should not hesitate to say to the hordes of Asiatic semibarbarians. ready now to be dumped upon the shores of the Pacific. whose habits of life. whose debased and debasing natures. whose immoral and pagan instincts. and whose want of appreciation of our political institutions make their incorporation and assimilation into our bodypolitic a moral impossibility. that our virgin soil shall not be polluted with their presence nor our laboring population degraded to their level. The small modicum of agricultural lands now remaining to the Government should be reserved for the actual settlement of Americans and those who seek to be Americanized. and no possible intrusion of the Asiatic should be permitted. He is worse than an infidel who will not provide for his own household. and that nation that will not protect its own people against the possibility of having its millions of laborers degraded by contact with the most debased of the offscouring of the Celestial Empire may well merit the judgment of Heaven. � But if it be in the interest of American civilization and of the perpetuity of republican institutions to exclude the inhabitants of the Celestial Empire from our shores. what reason can be assigned that we do not prepare to remove. not by forced expatriation or by any form of coercion. that portion of our population that. like the Chinese. are aliens to our race. whose blood does not mingle with tlat of the white race without corrupting it. and whose inferiority to the white race is an admitted fact? Shall we permit them to remain as a constituent element of the political power of this country. and continue in all time to be the howers of wood and drawers of water for the superior race?
Identified stereotypes
Asiatic people are described as 'semibarbarians' with 'debased natures' and 'immoral instincts' who would pollute the soil and degrade the laboring population.