Speech #570093469

I have no purpose or desire to pass any strictures upon that Senators action. He has a right to introduce any amendment he pleases. The only question that presents itself to my mind is that we had up the whole subject of Chinese immigration to the United States proper and to the United States improper. as some of us consider the Philippines. and everything else last spring. we discussed it exhaustively. and I thought any question as to the conditions in Hawaii and the necessities of that insular annex was sufficiently considered then to make it unnecessary for us six months afterwards to rush forward under the claim that there is a terrible dearth of labor in the Hawaiian Islands and that they are about to get into a condition of industrial collapse and all that kind of thing. It has occurred to me also that there might be other parts of the United States that would want labor and want it now and want it badly. and I do not really see why we should be discriminating in favor of a few corporations which own sugar plantations in the Hawaiian Islands and leaving out of consideration the millionswell. millions is not big enoughof acres of Southern lands that need drainage and need cultivation. I should like to have some explanation as to why these sugar planters in the Hawaiian Islands are such pets of ours that we can not pass a Chineseexclusion bill at one session but that we must come along and modify it at the next.