The Chinese question is not new in this body. We have had it here very often, and have had it here in important relations, and I wish to lay down this principle, that, so far as my vote is concerned, I will not admit a man by immigration to this country whom I am not willing to place on the basis of a citizen. . . .

I am told by those who are familiar with the commercial affairs of the Pacific slope that a person can be sent from any of the great Chinese ports to San Francisco for about thirty dollars. I suppose in an emigrant train over the Pacific Railroad from Omaha, not to speak of the expense of reaching Omaha, but from that point alone, it would cost fifty dollars per head. So that in point of cheap transportation to California the Chinaman to-day has an advantage over an American laborer in any part of the country, except in the case of those who are already on the Pacific coast.

Ought we to exclude them? The question lies in my mind thus: Either the Caucasian race will possess the Pacific slope or the Mongolian race will possess it. Give Mongolians the start to-day, with the keen thrust of necessity behind them, and with the ease of transportation and the inducement of higher wages before them, and it is entirely probable if not demonstrable that while we are filling up the other portions of the continent, they will occupy the great space of country between the Sierras and the Pacific coast. . . .

The senator from Ohio [Mr. Matthews] made light of the race trouble. I supposed if there be any part of the world where a man would not make light of a race trouble it was the United States. I supposed if there were any people in the world that had a race trouble on hand it was the American people. I supposed if the admonitions of our own history were any thing to us, we should regard the race trouble as the one thing to be dreaded, the one thing to be avoided. We are not through with it yet. It has cost us a great many lives; it has cost us a great many millions of treasure. Does any man feel that we are safely through with it now? Does any man here to-day assume that we have so entirely solved and settled all the troubles growing out of the negro-race trouble that we are prepared to invite a similar one? . . . With this trouble already upon us, it would, in my judgment, be the last degree of recklessness deliberately to invite or permit another and possibly a far more serious one to be thrust upon us.

Treat them like Christians, my colleague says; and yet I believe the Christian testimony from the Pacific coast is that the conversion of Chinese is largely a failure; that the demoralization of the white race is a much more rapid result of the contact than the conversion of the Chinese race, and that up to this time there has been little progress made in the one direction while much evil has been done in the other. I heard the honorable senator from California who sits on this side of the Chamber [Mr. Booth] say that there is not, as we understand it, in all the one hundred and twenty thousand Chinese (whether I state the exact number does not matter in this point of view), there does not exist among the whole of them the relation of family. There is not a peasant’s cottage inhabited by a Chinaman; there is not a hearthstone, as it is found and cherished in an American home, or an English home, or a German home, or a French home. There is not a domestic fireside in that sense; and yet you say that it is entirely safe to sit down and quietly permit that mode of life to be fastened upon our country. . . . I believe now that if the Congress of the United States should in effect confirm the treaty and the status of immigration as it now is, law and order could not be maintained in California without the interposition of the military five years hence. . . .

Chinese labor is servile labor. It is not free labor such as we intend to develop and encourage and build up in this country. It is labor that comes here under a mortgage. It is labor that comes here to subsist on what the American laborer cannot subsist on. You cannot work a man who must have beef and bread, and would like beer, in competition with a man who can live on rice. In all such conflicts and in all such struggles the result is not to bring up the man who lives on rice to the beef and bread standard, but it is to bring down the man living on beef and bread to the rice standard. Slave labor degraded free labor. It took out its respectability; it put an odious caste upon it. It throttled the prosperity of one of the fairest portions of the Union; and a worse than slave labor will throttle and impair the prosperity of a still finer and fairer section of the Union. We can choose here to-day whether our legislation shall be in the interest of the American free laborer or in favor of the servile laborer from China. . . .

[T]he question of substance is whether on full consideration we shall devote that interesting and important section of the United States which borders on the Peaceful Sea to be the home and the refuge of our own people and our own blood, or whether we shall leave it open, not to the competition of other nations like ourselves, but to those who, degraded themselves, will inevitably degrade us. We have this day to choose whether we shall have for the Pacific coast the civilization of Christ or the civilization of Confucius.

Source: James G. Blaine, Political Discussions: Legislative, Diplomatic, and Popular, 1856–1886 (Norwich, CT: Henry Bill, 1887), 216–31.