So, also, is the ignorant and unchristianized Chinaman making himself felt in our politics. He casts no ballot, he holds no office. He does not come to the polls to drink and smoke and sell himself to the highest bidder on election day; and yet his political influence already is as wide as the continent; his unwelcome ghost stalks through the halls of Congress, and broods over every political or religious convention that is holden between the two oceans. Already have we seen one sovereign State changing the terms of its constitution and revolutionizing its laws out of pure regard for the Chinaman. And, still more significant, we have seen our great National Congress voting to change the very genius of the Government, and to shut the doors that have for a hundred years stood open, and which we mean shall not be closed for a hundred years to come; and we will write over these open doors in letters of fire, so that the most distant islands of the sea may read: “This is the world’s asylum, free to the oppressed of all nations.” Now, I doubt not there are evils connected with the coming of the heathen Chinaman. There is oppression and sorrow brought home to many hearts. I feel that there must be more or less of pollution in his touch. I pity the State into which this old world sewerage empties itself. But the remedy is not in building walls, though they be heaven-high, on our Chinaward side. This evil can be handled and neutralized only by the Christian virtue that is in us. Can we convert this heathen material—permeate it with Christian thought? Can we assimilate it and weave it into the civil fabric we are making? If so, it will do us no harm; otherwise it will rankle like poison in our blood, and possibly work our destruction in the end. This question should not be settled in the political arena. It is a moral, a religious question. The forces that are needed now are those that lie in the hand of the Christian church. We must permeate this festering mass with the leaven of Christ, and we must do it speedily. The evil is growing. Politicians are beginning to treat it, and therefore it is rapidly growing worse. It cannot be cured by legislative enactment. Legislation knows of no instrumentality, save that the civil statute ultimately seeks support in the bayonet. Before we know it, this question may be baptized in blood. Those western shores are far away. The Rocky Mountain wall lifts up a tremendous barrier to separate us and make us twain; only one little thread of iron binds us together and makes us one. Let us not wait until the whole Pacific slope bristles with rebellion as the South did in ’61; but let us pour the strains of our Christian influence over the mountains. If we can Christianize this heathen mass, then the trouble is over, the danger passed. Self-protection, then, affords a most powerful motive in the prosecution of this work.