Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 14.djvu/206

 White immigration was thereafter agumented in California by the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads, that year completed, and in Oregon by large expenditure of money for railroads by Ben Holladay. In that same year politicians in Oregon, as well as in California, were making campaign against "Chinese cheap labor," among them Grover, then running first time for Governor. Against their assertion that Chinese "add nothing to the wealth of the country," Mr. Scott showed that the aliens had cleared large land areas for crops and were building railroads for use of the white population. Their number on the Pacific Coast less than forty thousand, and few in Oregon was, as yet, no menace to the white race and was contributing large capital, by its labor, to the uses of the country. "Every Chinaman leaves the products of his labor, a full equivalent for the wages paid him. He leaves more; he leaves the profit which his employer has made in the cheap labor he has furnished" (July 7, 1869). Often Mr. Scott told the white people that the Pacific Coast was slow in industrial progress because there were not enough workers; that Chinese were not snatching places from white men because they were doing work white men would not do; that the surfeit of white laborers in San Francisco, the center of agitation, did not exist elsewhere and that most of the work to be performed was outside the cities; that the aliens had done much to make Oregon and Washington habitable for white men, especially in clearing land a work too hard and cheap for white laborers; that they had been employed in this and other activities also because of scarcity and indolence of the whites.

But the Editor was prompt also to say that while Chinese were useful for labor, they could not be received in large numbers into American citizenship; that the two races were antagohistic, ethnically, politically, industrially. He asserted that however much Chinese industry would stimulate growth of the country, it was better to have peace. "They are not an assimilable element and they come in contact with our people in a way which cannot in the large run be favorable either to morals or prosperity. . . . Under this view we have believed it well