Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 14.djvu/209

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to pass a bill to restrict Chinese immigration" (March 21, 1879). On enactment of the exclusion law in 1882, he said (April 29): "The Pacific States have made a great fight and have won a great victory."

In 1905 Chinese in the Orient boycotted American goods because of the exclusion law and many exporters in the United States urged suspension of the exclusion law. The Chamber of Commerce of Portland recommended admission of a limited number of Chinese annually. This plan Mr. Scott opposed with citations from experience of twenty-five years before. Other matters were to be taken into account, he said, than exports and need of laborers. "We can never expect (August 18, 1905) that our laboring classes will assume any position except of unconquerable antagonism toward the Chinese. The history of every community on the Pacific Coast for the past thirty years proves it."

(July 5, 1905): "No conflict is so cruel as that between antagonistic races. ... No doubt Chinese laborers in this country would quicken Industries now dormant for want of hands to stir them. But how about politics? How about the race conflict? Do you want it? The Oregonian has a memory and it does not."

(July 22, 1905): "The commotion would be so great that it may be doubted whether, on the whole, the progress of the country would not be checked, rather than accelerated, even in ah industrial way."

(July 6, 1905): "The Chinese could do a lot of work here, of course—and work a lot of trouble. We want industrial development, but we want peace and must not have race war."

Inasmuch as Mr. Scott's opposition to Chinese expulsion has led some persons to suppose that he also resisted Chinese exclusion, it has seemed to the present writer appropriate to set forth Mr. Scott's attitude on this subject in some detail. The Editor understood the problem as many others did not—its native antipathies, its basic race hatreds. Therefore, he was equipped to deal with the subject according to "first principles" and moral precepts. His course was humane, rational