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they are quiet, orderly, and peaceable, by nature; they possess the rare
and probably peculiarly barbarous faculty of minding their own business.
They are as thrifty as Holland Dutch. They permit nothing to go to
waste. When they kill an animal for food, they find use for its hoofs,
hide, bones, entrails--everything. When other people throw away fruit
cans they pick them up, heat them, and secure the melted tin and solder.
They do not scorn refuse rags, paper, and broken glass. They can make
a blooming garden out of a sand-pile, for they seem to know how to
make manure out of everything which other people waste. As I have said
before, they are remarkably quick and intelligent, and they can all
read, write, and cipher. They are of an exceedingly observant and
inquiring disposition. I have been describing the lowest class
of Chinamen. Do not they compare favorably with the mass of other
immigrants? Will they not make good citizens? Are they not able to
confer a sound and solid prosperity upon a State? What makes a sounder
prosperity or invites and unshackles capital more surely than good,
cheap, reliable labor? California and Oregon are vast, uncultivated
grain fields. I am enabled to state this in the face of the fact that
California yields twenty million bushels of wheat this year! California
and Oregon will fill up with Chinamen, and these grain fields will be
cultivated up to their highest capacity. In time, some of them will be
owned by Chinamen, inasmuch as the treaty gives them the right to own
real estate. The very men on the Pacific coast who will be loudest in
their abuse of the treaty will be among those most benefited by it--the
day-laborers. The Chinamen, able to work for half wages, will take their
rough manual labor off the hands of these white men, and then the
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