Heathen Slaves and Christian Rulers | Page 4

abundant to him. Almost unnoticed, the Orient is telescoping its way into the very heart of the Occident, and with fearful portent and peril, particularly to the Western woman.
This is not what is desired, but it will be inevitable. Exclusion laws must finally give way before the pressure. Already the Orient is knocking vigorously at the door of the Occident, and unless admission is granted soon, measures of retaliation will be operated to force an entrance. How to administer them the Orient already knows, for has not the door to his domicile been already forced open by the Western trader? The Orient is fast arming for the conflict.
The men of the days of sailing vessels, who went to the far East and made sport of and trampled upon the virtue of the women of a weaker nation, have not all died in peace, leaving their vices far off and gathering virtues about them to crown their old age with venerableness. Some have lived to see that whatsoever man soweth that shall he also reap. They have lived to see the tide setting in in the other direction, and the human wreckage of past vices swept by the current of immigration close to their own domicile. Their own children are in danger of being engulfed in the polluting flood of Oriental life in our midst. After many days vices come home. Man sowed the wind; the whirlwind must be reaped. The Oriental slave trader and the Oriental slave promise to become a terrible menace and scourge to our twentieth century civilization. Herein lies great peril to American womanhood. Whether we wish it to be so or not,--whether we perceive from the first that it is so or not, there is a solidarity of womanhood that men and women must reckon with. The man who wrongs another's daughter perceives afterwards that he wronged his own daughter thereby. We cannot, without sin against humanity, ask the scoffer's question, "Am I my sister's keeper?"--not even concerning the poorest and meanest foreign woman, for the reason that she is our sister. The conditions that surround the Hong Kong slave girl in California are bound in time to have their influence upon the social, legal and moral status of all California women, and later of all American womanhood.
In considering the life history of the Chinese woman living in our Chinatowns in America, therefore, we are studying matters of vital importance to us. And in order to a clear understanding of the matter, we must go back to the beginning of the slave-trade which has brought these women to the West.
Four points on the south coast of China are of especial interest to us, being the sources of supply of this slave-trade. These are Macao, Canton, Kowloon and Hong Kong, and the women coming to the West from this region all pass through Hong Kong, remaining there a longer or shorter time, the latter place being the emporium and thoroughfare of all the surrounding ports.
The south coast of China is split by a Y-shaped gap, at about its middle, where the Canton river bursts the confines of its banks and plunges into the sea. The lips of this mouth of the river are everted like those of an aboriginal African, and like a pendant from the eastern lip hangs the Island of Hong Kong, separated from the mainland by water only one-fourth of a mile wide. From the opposite or western lip hangs another pendant, a small island upon which is situated the Portuguese city of Macao. The mainland adjoining Hong Kong is the peninsula of Kowloon, ceded to the British with the island of Hong Kong. Well up in the mouth of the river on its western bank, some eighty miles from Hong Kong, is the city of Canton.
Let us imagine for a moment that the on-coming civilization of our country pushed the American Indians not westward but southward toward the Gulf of Mexico and along the banks of the Mississippi, and compressed them on every side until at last they were obliged to take to boats in the mouth of the Mississippi and live there perpetually, seldom stepping foot on land.
Now we are the better able to understand exactly what took place with an aboriginal tribe in China. These aborigines were, centuries ago, pushed southward by an on-coming civilization until at last, by imperial decree, they were forbidden to live anywhere except on boats in the mouth of the Canton river, floating up and down that stream, and sailing about Hong Kong and Macao in the more open sea.
They must have been always a hardy people, for the river population about Canton numbers today nearly 200,000 souls. In 1730, the severity of the laws regulating their lives was relaxed somewhat by imperial decree, and since