II. I plead for China because of the wrongs she has suffered at nominally Christian hands, and especially at the hands of the United States Government. The anti-Chinese bill is a violation of treaty, a violation of the spirit of impartial justice to foreigners, a violation of our own interest, because opposed to the spirit of Christ, which when resisted always reacts. It was carried through, like the opium trade, for present personal advantage on a small scale. It is the child of partisan politics, born out of a fear lest other foreign laborers, finding themselves underbidden by the more economical Chinese, might raise an outcry, and disturb the equilibrium of party power. Hence, to gain votes, one party will sacrifice national policy and Christian principle, and the other will do the same rather than lose votes. Thus China must be affronted, and Christianity dishonored before the world. It is not, however, the American people as such who have done this thing—thank God for that! Whenever the national conscience has spoken at all on the subject, it has spoken against it. This anti-Chinese legislation is the adoption, in America, of the old barbaric cast-off policy of exclusion, which China herself has pursued for centuries toward other nations. China is going forward: we have gone back. Now what is to be the result in this case? It must be _reaction_. There must come reaction against American commerce, losing more than it gains, reaction against American integrity as to treaty stipulations, awakening Chinese distrust and hate, casting a blight upon Western civilization and, worst of all, defeating American Christianity. The great American nation has divided at the Chinese quarter. Say what you will, that Chinese quarter in San Francisco has become the great moral _divortium_ or water-shed of America where Christian and anti-Christian sentiment divide. On one side the Chinese workman is mobbed, excluded; on the other he is educated and led to Christ. On the one side men act for party ends and call the Chinaman a “heathen dog;” on the other they recognize him with all his infirmities as a man for whom Christ died, and call him brother. This is a tremendous responsibility we assume when we thus prejudice a fifth part of the human family against the religion of Christ.