Critics may be reminded that missionaries are American citizens; that when gamblers and drunkards and adventurers and distillery agents in China claim the rights of citizenship, the missionary does not forfeit his rights by a residence in China for the purpose of teaching the young, healing the sick, distributing the Bible and preaching the gospel of Christ, particularly when treaties expressly guarantee him protection in the exercise of these very privileges. It is odd to find some people insisting that a dissolute trader should be allowed to go wherever he pleases and raising a tremendous hubbub if a hair of his head is injured, while at the same time they appear to deem it an unwarranted thing for a decent man to go to China on a mission of peace and good-will. While the individual missionary is, of course, free to renounce his claim to the protection of home citizenship, such renunciation is neither necessary nor expedient. There is not the slightest probability that our Government will require it, and if it should, the public sentiment of the United States would not tolerate such an order for a week. No self-respecting nation can expatriate its citizens who go abroad to do good. The policy of the United States was indicated in the note of the Hon. J. C. B. Davis, acting Secretary of State, to the United States Minister at Peking, October 19, 1871. ``The rights of citizens of the United States in China are well defined by treaty. So long as they attend peaceably to their affairs they are to be placed on a common footing of amity and good-will with subjects of China, and are to receive and enjoy for themselves, and everything appertaining to them, protection and defense from all insults and injuries. They have the right to reside at any of the ports open to foreign commerce, to rent houses and places of business, or to build such upon sites which they have the right to hire. They have secured to them the right to build churches and cemeteries, and they may teach or worship in those churches without being harassed, persecuted, interfered with, or molested. These are some of the rights which are expressly and in terms granted to the United States, for their citizens, by the Treaty of 1858. If I rightly apprehend the spirit of the note of the Foreign Office, and of the regulations which accompany it, there is, to state it in the least objectionable form, an apprehension in the yamen that it may become necessary to curtail some of these rights, in consequence of the alleged conduct of French missionaries. This idea cannot be entertained for one moment by the United States.'' This position was given new emphasis by the note sent by Secretary of State John Hay to the Hon. Horace Porter, United States Ambassador to France, in response to a communication from the American Chamber of Commerce in Paris in 1903. In this note Mr. Hay said: