The Advancement of His Kingdom

From a book I am reading with the Kindle app on my smartphone. This follows a lengthy and not at all unbiased tour of San Francisco's Chinatown.

As we turn from the Joss-House and walk away from this bit of heathendom in the heart of an active, stirring, prosperous, great American city with its Christian civilisation and its Christian Churches and its Christian homes, we cannot but ask ourselves what would have been the history of the Pacific States, of California with its nearly eight hundred miles of coast, if the Chinese had settled here centuries ago? If they had been navigators and colonizers like the Phoenicians of old, like the Greeks and Romans, if they had had a Columbus, a Balboa, a Cabrillo, a Drake, the whole history of the country west of the Rocky Mountains might have been totally different. Millions of Chinamen instead of thousands might now be in possession of that great region of our land, and great cities like Canton and Fuchau, Pekin and Tientsin, might rise up on the view instead of San Diego and Los Angeles, Sacramento and San Francisco, with their idolatry and peculiar life and customs.

Another question may be asked here by way of speculation. What would have been the effect of Chinese occupation of the Pacific coast on the Indians of all the region west of the Rocky Mountains? Would the followers of Confucius have incorporated them into their nationality, supplanted them, or caused them to vanish out of sight? What problems these for the ethnologist! Doubtless there would have been intermarriages of the races with new generations of commingled blood. And what would have been the result of this? There is a story which I have read somewhere, that long years ago a Chinese junk was driven by the winds to the shores of California, and that a Chinese merchant on board took an Indian maiden to wife and bore her home to the Flowery Kingdom, and that from this marriage was descended the famous statesman Li Hung Chang.

But whatever the fortunes of the Indians, or the Chinese in their appropriation of the Pacific coast, it would not have been so advantageous to civilisation, to the progress of humanity. It would have been loss, and a hindrance to the Anglo-Saxon race destined now to rule the world and to break down every barrier and to set up the standard of the Cross everywhere for the glory of the true God. His hand is apparent in it all. He directs the great movements of history for the welfare of mankind, and He controls the destinies of nations for the advancement of His Kingdom!

-- Joseph Carey, D.D., 1902

Well, too bad, but His Kingdom's advance seems to have been stymied by modernism if not *gasp* liberalism. Nor did the Heathen Chinee ever become sons of the Gospel and thus allow the natural gifts of their race to flower fully -- under Anglo-Saxon hegemony, of course.

You might not credit it, but the author of this piece, an Episcopal churchman from Albany, New York, vehemently opposed the Geary Act and other limits on Chinese immigration.

The outcry against them as competing with white laborers and artisans is more the result of political agitation for political purposes than good judgment. Where they have been displaced on farms, in mills, in warehouses, in domestic life, white men and women have not been found to take their places and do the work which they can do so well.

Li Hung Chang, as it happens, was as an imperial functionary instrumental in Chinese Gordon's career. I am interested to know whence the tale of his American Indian ancestry and whether there could be any truth to it or if it was merely a speculation reflecting the eugenicist thinking prevalent in that day.