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36  THE CRISIS

ly presented by representatives of the different life-callings, and questions of race relationships wer discussed with frankness and sincerity by white and black alike. A noteworthy achievement of the Convention was the enrollment of 240 male delegates who expressed willingness to consider definite forms of Christian service as life-work. John R. Mott, who presided at all the sessions, declared it to be one of the most significant conventions in the religious history of America.

There are six secretaries of the International Committee whose business it is to supervise the work of colored Young Men's Christian Associations. They were W. A. Hunton, J. E. Moorland, J. B. Watson, R. P. Hamlin, C. H. Tobias, and A. L. Jackson. Mr. Hunton, the senior secretary has served continuously for 27 years. Mr. Jackson, the latest addition to the staff, was class orator at the 1914 commencement of Harvard University. He takes the place of Mr. D. D. Jones, who recently resigned to take Charge of the Colored Men's Branch of St. Louis.

[[image - black & white photo of a group of young men sitting in chairs under a tree]]
[[caption]] COLORED Y.M.C.A. SUMMER TRAINING SCHOOL [[/caption]]

THE GOLDEN-FACED PEOPLE

A Story of the Chinese Conquest of America

By NICHOLAS VACHEL LINDSAY

I. Trouble with Laundryman

He was a laundry man who ironed shirts superbly, yet with that irritating air of being a little above his business. His picked English showed me that he aspired to be something more than a coolie. I thought we have been friends for some months, but now old Yellow-arms clutched my week's washing because I had lost my half of his red ticket. I showed him for the tenth time the name on the linen. I was hurry to dress for the Lincoln's birthday banquet. Pushing the money towards him, I jumped for the exit with my goods. He turned out the gas. I heard him scramble over the counter. He was between me and the door.



THE GOLDEN-FACED PEOPLE  37

He hit me with the handle of his broom. Then I was under the delusion that I made for the alley through the side entrance.

II. Results of Being Hit With a Broom.

I found myself in a long, iron-floored passage, thick with yellow fog. Just as suddenly I was in a packed assembly room where the walls blazed with dragon-embroidered lanterns. I turned around. The door of iron behind me was closed. My pursuer was not in sight.

The place was like a sort of heathen temple. But no, the next thing that caught my eye was the phrase: "In the year of Christ." It appeared that this fantastic gathering was about to dedicate with speeches and ceremonies a tablet inscribed: "In the year of Christ two thousand eight hundred and nine Lin-Kon was born. This memorial is set upon the one hundredth anniversary of his birth of his meritorious and superior career. He was the emancipator of the white man."

All eyes in the room were on this tablet. It was above the speaker's platform.

The shirt-washer had hit me pretty hard. I did not realize it all at once but he had knocked me through that iron door into the next millennium. He had knocked the Chinese language into my head, for these inscriptions were written in that ideograph. And now I was amazed to behold him, or a person quite like him sitting in a pew at one side of the platform. He blinked there in majesty that was a tremendous expansion of the streak of dignity with which he once ironed shirts. He had somehow knocked another thing into my head—that a Chinaman is so infinitely superior to a white man there is no comparison. I knew that was the meaning of the empty bench, reserved for him exclusively, despite the crowded aisles.

The audience was one-half Anglo-Saxon. The other half seemed Chines, but it slowly dawned on me that they were not! They were Eurasians, half yellow, half white, who looked scornfully upon us who were so pure and pale. But, on the other hand, they glanced furtively in the direction of their solitary Chinese visitor with eyes of abject abasement.

III. How Chinese Superiority Came About.

I was being patronizingly escorted toward the tablet by some of these half-yellow men. I knew I was being treated with honors because of my learning, and in spite of my color. I was being delicately and deprecatingly introduced to half a score of half-yellow speakers of the evening, there grouped about the tablet.

Then I was being proclaimed in the audience as once who had studied with the zeal the Chinese conquest of America. I laid down my laundry bundle. I was in a whirlwind of astonishing impressions. And it was no longer a bundle, but had shrunken into a manuscript, in Chinese characters which I knew I myself had written. I opened it and read and commented to the crowed—something after this fashion:

"When our fathers taught the Golden People mechanics in the sordid ages of the world, the white man was the leader of civilization." There was a mighty cheer. Especially those almost white grew vociferous. Gongs were beaten. Fans were thumped against the seats till they were splinters. I continued: "Our fathers were not scared when the Golden Men instituted their thorough-going compulsory education, nor when they put their immortal university from Canton to Lhassa. But that was the crucial Chinese mind the Religion of Science took the place of the Religion of Literature, which same had been with them from the days of Shen and Yao. Now in their laboratories were hatched the medical lodges and inventors of secret societies, infamous and sublime. They sent forth whirlwinds of tracts with sociological, hygienic and biological remedies for China. These became well nigh inspired in the eyes of sects and sub-sects, who prayed over their crucibles in their little back-rooms, with the phrenzy of Mohammedans entering battle.

"Private lists were compiled of high and low families prone to opium or vice or bad citizenship, an of many others with a tendency to crime or idiocy. When the storm broke, these were sure fall, whatever the apparent quarrel. Two provinces below the normal, were almost wiped out Over every temple door and city gave appeared the quotation from the scientific conspirator Dahwin: 'Science and Heaven are one.' And revolutionary banners proclaimed his more terrible saying, 'None but Superior men are fit to live.' Every revolution aims at the annihilation of some class. Here all perished but the sublet, the wise and the strong.

"In the counter-revolution Science apparently returned to her kitchen and work-