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ART. 6. Citizens of the United States visiting or residing
in China shall enjoy the same privileges, immunities, or
exemptions in respect to travel or residence as may there be
enjoyed by the citizens or subjects of the most favored
nation; and, reciprocally, Chinese subjects visiting or
residing in the United States shall enjoy the same
privileges, immunities and exemptions in respect to travel
or residence as may be enjoyed by the citizens or subjects
of the most favored nation; but nothing herein contained
shall be held to confer naturalization upon the citizens of
the United States in China, nor upon the subjects of China
in the United States.
There will be weeping, and wailing, and gnashing of teeth on the Pacific
coast when Article 6 is read. For, at one sweep, all the crippling,
intolerant, and unconstitutional laws framed by California against
Chinamen pass away, and discover (in stage parlance) 20,000
prospective Hong Kong and Suchow voters and office-holders! Tableau. I
am not fond of Chinamen, but I am still less fond of seeing them wronged
and abused. If the reader has not lived in San Francisco, he can have
only a very faint conception of the tremendous significance of this
mild-looking, unpretentious Article 6. It lifts a degraded, snubbed,
vilified, and hated race of men out of the mud and invests them with the
purple of American sovereignty. It makes men out of beasts of burden.
The first iniquity it strikes at is that same revolutionary one of
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