easily become in general commerce and industry on the Pacific coast."

It should, therefore, behoove capital not to be too persuasive in its invitations to immigrants. It may find that "the Greeks are at its door. If American and Chinese labor cannot live in accord, which will capital prefer? Pay the sons of our soil a fair compensation, with prosperity, or take cheap John for a ruler, with adversity? The question is of easy solution; a child can give the answer.

But to go back to the inquiry. If John is harmless has he any business here? Can the nation afford to sink the high standard of the laboring man in the social scale? Has it the power to do so? Bring down the price of our labor by competition with Chinese, and so much you lower the flag! The power and influence of that, at home and abroad, is measured by the intellectual standard of the masses. To make them the representative of a ruling class they must be educated; to be educated requires liberal pay for wages. The introduction of Chinese cheap labor is the first step towards ignorance, because it lessens the means of living, measured by our American customs; and the demoralization of the masses will inevitably follow.

Here labor is honorable, because it is well paid, and those who labor have a voice in the public affairs.

John is a slave; he was born a slave, educated a slave; he has slavish propensities; he obeys his masters; he cringes; he fawns; he does not aspire to equality, much less to command, i.e., while in the minority; but when he becomes the master, John's humiliation assumes a very different shade. As to the idea of bringing him up to the American standard in moral, social, and religious culture, it cannot be done. You may reduce that standard to him, but you cannot bring him up to it. When the leopard changes his spots, and the Ethiopian his skin, it may be done. The Jesuits have been laboring for five hundred years to Christianize him, but they have most signally failed. He is wedded to his idols, and there he will remain.

The national legislature should prohibit the importation of Chinese. This nation has had a surfeit of negro importation. Four millions of them have caused a civil war of magnitude, which is without a parallel in the world's history. The legislature should do more; it should prevent their immigration. It may seem proscriptive, but self-preservation is the first law of nature. With no more force does the maxim apply to men than nations. It is a duty which this nation owes to its founders, as well as to posterity, that it should preserve the high and exalted position of civilization which now exists. The introduction of this Mongol race is in opposition to the idea. The influences of the

customs and laws and government of the United States are gradually extending throughout the globe, at least the enlightened part of it. This should not cease. We have a people here whose blood comes down through the veins of a brave, proud, and intellectual European ancestry-men who fear and believe in a Supreme Being; who believe in, and are influenced by, the doctrine of future rewards and punishments; who pray with their mouths and hearts, not with machines; who worship a spiritual, invisible God, not a visible god with arms and legs of copper and brass; who see and realize that there is a creative power in the firmament, the motion and grandeur of the heavenly bodies, in the ocean and in the everlasting rocks; who take the revelation of God for their law, and who square the actions of their lives by it. These are the people who now hold and rule the Western Hemisphere. Who would see it changed?

Whoever may denounce these doctrines as those of an alarmist does not appreciate the situation. And now is the time to assert and maintain them. When the Chinese become the owners of the farms, the manufactories, the mills, the mines, and the ships, it will be too late.

I wish to cast no reproach nor excite ill will or hatred against, any of God's creatures; they are all of His handiwork, made for designs and purposes beyond

our comprehension. Let the spaces and distances, alike as to geographical limits and mental capacity, remain as He established them. Congo for the negro, and Asia for the Chinese; there they belong, and there let them remain. This continent, as well as its great and vast facilities, belongs by conquest to a higher caste of men than either of those named. Its occupation has been reserved, through countless cycles of time, for the men who now stand upon its soil, and blind and prejudiced against his own race and color is he who cannot see, feel, and appreciate the fact.

Laboring men may here not merely assert, but maintain, if they will, perfect and exact equality. I mean the men of that caste who have made the country what it is; for them it is none too large. There is no room here for China or Japan, Polynesia or Africa. It is American, as we understand that word, and for the occupation solely of those who are of the same race with us.

HAVING disposed of the subject of Chinese cheap labor, and the effects, in our judgment, it would have upon the interests of the laboring men of this country, as also upon the form and character of the government itself, I will retrace my steps and treat upon those matters which most intimately concern mine labor in our immediate vicinity, i.e. the Anthracite Coal Region.

One of the chief results of unions and co-operative measures recently has been the establishment of a "basis." This word, within the last twelvemonth, has become significant, and has a meaning, as used by miners, somewhat different from the one given in lexicons. It is defined to be "the foundation of a

thing." But the miners use the term as expressing "the foundation" of the price of labor, when it is really "the foundation of the price of coal." But they understand it, and capital is beginning to understand it. I shall use the word basis in the miners' acceptation of it.