them no penalty other than that of being sent back if they are detected, will keep them out, when the fear of death has been found wholly ineffective to do so? Will exclusion exclude under such conditions as these? Moreover, can any law ever be enacted by an American Congress that would not shock the Christian world by the inhumanity of its penalties, that will ever be effective in excluding them from our soil? For violations of State and municipal laws the jails and prisons have been crowded with Chinese for months and years, and all to no purpose. The constant perpetration of the same offenses manifests but too plainly the utter inutility of dealing with the Chinese by any such methods as these.
The race that is reared under the fear of the "cangue," the "bastinado," and limb and bodily torture of hideous ingenuity as punishments for trivial offenses, can not be restrained or terrorized by prison penalties as ordinarily provided under American laws. Much less can they be prevented from attempting to gain entrance into the country by the mere fear of being sent back if detected. And it may well be believed that thousands upon thousands would still continue the attempt, in willing exchange for free board and lodging in a well-kept American prison, with hard labor, were that penalty made to attach to the act.
Under such circumstances as these, will exclusion exclude, in the way and manner provided in the "Scott Exclusion Act"? More than this, can any remedy for Chinese immigration be devised that does not look to the stationing of an army of thousands of men along our northern and southern borders, and at a cost bordering upon the permanent prosecution of a defensive war, except by treaty co-operation on the part of the British provinces on the north and Mexico on the south?
The inefficiency of this hasty political measure of exclusion is only equaled by the public disgrace involved in the manner of its inception and enactment, which the most radical believer in the policy of Chinese exclusion can not fail to admit constitutes the most shameful page in American history.
If we are to assume that this or any other legislation that may be had by Congress can be made to result in effectual Chinese exclusion, the problems that present themselves for consideration are hardly less interesting and deserving of study than if this class of immigration were to be tolerated indefinitely. Already there are probably more than 200,000 Chinese upon American soil. In mode of life, costume, religion, clannishness, social vices, and language, they may be said to have evinced no perceptible change during the forty years that have elapsed since they found lodgment here. Had they, during all this period, remained in the heart of the Chinese Empire, they could not have been more in-
