Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/200

188 plausible such a theory may sound, forty years' experience in San Francisco testifies to the contrary. A people of traditions, the lives, work, and history of whose generations are and always have been but a repetition of each other, they seem incapable of change except in the acquisition of such mechanical skill and knowledge as can be made subservient to their material advantage.

The successful exclusion of further Chinese immigration, and thereby the complete isolation of the Chinese who are among us from their countrymen at home, will certainly offer a more favorable field for Christian missionary work than has heretofore existed. But that which has been accomplished thus far certainly does not inspire confidence that much is to be gained in that direction. Mr. Gibson, the most prominent of all missionary workers among the Chinese in California, testified in 1876 to the effect that, out of one hundred and fifty thousand Chinese in California, but two hundred and seventy-one had, up to that date, been baptized and received into Christian church communion. And he failed entirely to note how many of these had fallen from grace, and gone back to their original faith and practices. He failed also to give the simple truth to the world that, for every "soul so hopefully converted and saved"—to use his own words—thousands of young men had been ruined by the presence of the Chinese through the introduction and spread of the opium habit, the dissemination of hereditary disease through their innumerable dens of prostitution, the destructive influences of their lottery and gambling dens, and the general demoralization of the field of labor.

Is there not something that always has and always will successfully resist efforts at Christianization of the Chinese? Let us resort again to the testimony of that devout and earnest missionary, the Abbé Hue, than whom no one has ever written more clearly and truthfully of the habits and characteristics of the race:

"In the five ports open to Europeans, religious liberty really does exist, and it is protected by the presence of consuls and ships of war. Yet the number of Christians does not increase more rapidly than in the interior of the empire. In Macao, Hong-Kong, Manila, Singapore, Penang, Batavia, though they are under the dominion of Europeans, the great mass of the population consists of Chinese, who for the most part are permanently settled in these cities, and hold in their hands the great interests of agriculture, commerce, and industry. It is certainly not the fault of persecution of the European authorities that hinders them from embracing Christianity. Yet the conversions are not more numerous than elsewhere. ...

"The Chinese are so completely absorbed in temporal interests,