Various Acts were passed by Congress from time to time for the restriction and exclusion of Chinese and other Oriental immigrants, and the trouble, though not even yet completely disposed of, was got under a measure of control. Sumner lived long enough to oppose the earlier of these very sensible laws, and, needless to say, trotted out the Declaration of Independence, though in this case the application was even more absurd than in that of the Negro. The Negro, at any rate, was already resident in America, and had been brought there in the first instance without his own consent; and this fact, though it did not make him a citizen, did create a moral responsibility towards him on the part of the American Commonwealth. Towards the Chinaman it had no responsibility whatever. Doubtless he had, as a man, his natural rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"--in China. But whoever said anything so absurd as that it was one of the natural rights of man to live in America? It was, however, less to the increased absurdity of his argument than to the less favourable bias of his audience that Sumner owed his failure to change the course of legislation in this instance. An argument only one degree less absurd had done well enough as a reason for the enslavement and profanation of the South a year or two before. But there was no great party hoping to perpetuate its power by the aid of the Chinese, nor was there a defeated and unpopular section to be punished for its "treason" by being made over to Mongolian masters. Indeed, Congress, while rejecting Sumner's argument, made a concession to his monomania on the subject of Negroes, and a clause was inserted in the Act whereby no person "of African descent" should be excluded--with the curious result that to this day, while a yellow face is a bar to the prospective immigrant, a black face is, theoretically at any rate, actually a passport.