Speech #470056546

Oregon was settled up. the Rocky Mountains commenced yielding their vast treasures of silver and gold. and great inducements to the flow of population from this part of the United States and from the entire world drew all classes of people to that region. This inducement spread its influence across the Pacific Ocean. It reached the ears not of the poor. ignorant. and debased Chinese and Japanese coolies. but of the factors. the agents. the men who made commerce ofhuman labor. and coolies were flooded in upon that country in great numbers. It became necessary for us to legislate against this. and soon it became necessary that some resort shmould be made by them to an evasion in order to escape the penal inflictions of our statutes. And what was that resort? It was. simply that the contract should be kept silent and quiet- that the men who wore imported from China should come here apparently free and of their own accord. but in fact and in truth that they cameas much bound by the servitude in which they had engaged in China as te coolies ever were. There never was a time when a cooly was absolutely sold into. slavery. there was never a ti me when one man sold a cooly to another.. but there was a time in which coolies were obtained from the vast swarms of population in the oriental countries. and they were thereengaged in the stipulations of contracts which were enforced against them in this country. We legislated against that with freedom and with boldness and without question. No man rose in the Senate or elsewhere in the United States to deny or to question the power of Congress to prevent the immigration of these oriental people under such circumstances. What is the condition now of the Chinese laborer on the Pacific slope? lie comes to this country the bondman of some importer of human labor. The honorable Senators from California and from Oregon and from Nevada will sustain me in what I say. and my information was not derived from them. but from the people of California. when I state that vast masses of Chinese laborers who have been imported in the last twenty years to the Pacific slope have come. under the obligations of a contract for a long term of service which they are incapable of renouncing.