It should therefore
be prevented, either by a continuation of the "gentlemen's agreement"
now in force between the United States and Japan, and by similar
agreements with other nations, or by some such non-invidious measure as
that proposed by Dr. Gulick. This exclusion should not of course be
applied to the intellectual classes, whose presence here would offer
advantages which would outweigh the disadvantages.
We have a different situation in the Philippine islands, there the
yellow races have been denied admission since the United States took
possession. Previously, the Chinese had been trading there for
centuries, and had settled in considerable numbers almost from the time
the Spaniards colonized the archipelago.
At present it is estimated that there are 100,000 Chinese in the
islands, and their situation was not put too strongly by A. E. Jenks,
when he wrote:[153]
"As to the Chinese, it does not matter much what they themselves desire;
but what their descendants desire will go far toward answering the whole
question of the Filipinos' volition toward assimilation, because they
are _the_ Filipinos. To be specific: During the latter days of my
residence in the Islands in 1905 Governor-General Wright one day told me
that he had recently personally received from one of the most
distinguished Filipinos of the time, and a member of the Insular Civil
Commission, the statement that 'there was not a single prominent and
dominant family among the Christianized Filipinos which did not possess
Chinese blood.
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