Rensselaer Republican, Volume 18, Number 27, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 March 1886 — Nonsense About Chinese. [ARTICLE]

Nonsense About Chinese.

It is nonsense to talk of any people as the Chinese have been habitually talked of in our press and on our platforms. Every educated man knows that the Chinese, whatever their faults, are not a race to be set down with indiscriminate invective. They are a 1 race that has produced sages, scholars, inventors,, patriots, among the greatest the world has known; a race of many virtues and great intelligence. Every one who has known Chinamen personally knows that a great deal of what is said of them is sheer untruth—either mendacity or the product of a brain so excited by intolerance as not to know what was untruth. For instance, one of our most reputable journals printed two or three years since a contribution in which it was urged that a Chinaman was not a human being, had no soul, and no claim to common humanity on us. The proof offered was that laughing and crying were the distinctive marks of the human animal, and no one had ever seen a Chinaman laugh or cry. lam not Pertain that the major premise is zoologically correct, but I can bear witness to the minor premise, for I constantly see the Chinamen that come under my observation laughing as merrily as children when they get to skylarking among themselves, or when their mastery of the language proves sufficient to convey an American joke to their comprehensiofi. I have seen them stand and laugh with bash- . fulneßs f too, when making a little present or undergoing some other socially trying interview. They are stoical, reticent, and proud, and it is probable that few people have ever seen them cry; yet, I have seen one Chinaman sit down and cry with vexation because his bread would not rise, another to shed tears of indignation over a breach of good faith that had been practiced upon him, and another to walk to a window to hide his tears at parting with a baby he had become attached to in the family where he worked.—lT. Shewin, in the Overland Monthly.