Speech #510157875

President. the Senator is entirely mistaken. He is the gentleman who has the prejudices. and not I. 1 am talking facts. Talk about bringing immigrants here to settle along the lines of the railroads! What did I his country behold after it granted $64. 000.000 in bonds and hundreds of millions of acres of the public domain to the Pacific railroads that they might build a great transcontinental line? We beheld the officers of the Pacific railroad companies importing from China 5.000 Chinese laborers. and placing them along the line of those railroads to build themChinese laborers. who worked by the day at cheaper wages than American laborers or any European laborers who might be imported into this country would work. and who gathered up all their earnings and sent them back to their fatherland. and even when they died their remains were to lie carried back and buried in China. Talk now about the settlement of our Western lands and the construction of our railroads in the West by this system! Not a word of it. sir. Instead of those great railroads taking immigrants from Europe and building the roads and paying them in lands and settling them along the line as farmers and laborers so as to build up and develop that great Western country. they took the Chinese and shipped them from point to point. and today thousands and millions of acres of land along the side of those railroads are unoccupied. with not a solitary settler there. Mr. President.