(1.) The Indians, the Negroes and the Chinese I regard as the divinely appointed agents by which the principles that underlie American civilization are to be finally tested. Every utterance on the Fourth of July, from the Declaration of Independence till this hour, has made the _right of asylum_ a pre-eminent feature of American civilization. So whenever a man has been impelled by the dictates of his conscience to leave his native land and seek a foreign shore, that he might not be compelled to live in false alliance with the Church and worship God in a way he did not elect; whenever a man, full of noble impulses, has felt the hopelessness of his life, so far as any ambitious scheme was concerned; or the education of his children—a man feeling the tyranny of continuous labor, without the possibility of accumulation—this man has ever been gladly welcomed to America. So the Puritan, so the Huguenot, so the Dutchman, so the Lutheran—whatever a man’s religious training, America has given him hearty greeting. Even the atheist and the infidel have found a refuge under the folds of this flag. America has welcomed them to the shadow of her pines and palmettoes and to her golden Pacific. But what a niggardly right of asylum does she give to the poor Negro, as he is emancipated from his bonds; and to the wretched Indian, whom she shuts up in Western territories; and, most of all, to the poor Chinaman, as he comes from his joss-house, with the instincts of a higher civilization impelling him from the stagnation of centuries to the shores of the Pacific! It behooves us to inquire whether this precious right of asylum is to be denied to the weaker races; whether we are going to lose this peculiar feature of our nation, that throws its broad land open to the world. Is it not true now, as in the past, that this is a vast sanctuary, and that if a man lays hold of the horns of its altar, there shall be nothing to drag him from his possession of freedom? He stands on holy ground. In the British islands, the races that have appeared in its history have been amalgamated—welded by the mace and the battle-axe. In France, the various tribes and races that, one after another, possessed that land, were woven together, in warp and woof, by fire and blood. In Germany, the Prussians have brought together that great mass of people as one, through bitter and tremendous wars, the echoes of which have scarce died away. America proposes a far different solution. She recognizes the nobility of the characteristics developed by the various races. She wants the African, the Chinaman, the Teuton—all races—to labor side by side; to develop not only her wealth and prosperity, but, most of all, the typical American humanity.