If any foreign-born citizen is disposed to hearken to the Senator from California impeaching me, I ask him to bear in mind how I stood for his rights at another time, when there were fewer ready to stand for them than now.

All my votes in this Chamber, from the first day that I entered it down to this moment, have been in the same direction, and for that welcome which I thus early announced.

Never have I missed an occasion to vote for their protection; never shall I miss any such occasion.

If I do not adopt the expedients proposed, it is because I regard them as less calculated to produce the much-desired result than other means equally at hand, to the end that the rights of our naturalized citizens may find adequate…

The present bill can do little good, and may do harm.

It will not protect a single citizen; but it may be a drag on those pending negotiations by which the rights of all will be secured.

We may, by our declarations, by our diplomacy, by our power, do much; but it is by our treaties that we shall fix all these rights in adamant.

The Senator seems to have no higher idea than to write them in the fleeting passions of party.

My vote will never be wanting to elevate them above all such fitful condition, and to place them under the perpetual sanction of International Law,--the only law which can bind two different powers.

Be the person Irish or German or African or Chinese, he shall have from me the same equal protection.

He is one of us, who, going forth into a strange country, has come back with its highest trusts and dignities.

Once the representative of a single Congressional district, he now represents the most populous nation of the globe.

Once the representative of little more than a third part of Boston, he is now the representative of more than a third part of the human race.

Here is opportunity on a surpassing scale,--employed, I am sure, to advance the best interests of the human family; and if these are advanced, no nation can suffer.

With justice and generosity as the reciprocal rule,--and nothing else can be the aim of this great Embassy,--there can be no limits to the immeasurable consequences.

Nor can I hesitate to say that concessions and privileges are of less consequence than that spirit of friendship and good neighborhood, embracing alike the distant and the near, which, once established, renders all else easy.

Each will know the other better, and better comprehend that condition of mutual dependence which is the law of humanity.

In relations among nations, as in common life, this is of infinite value.

I refer to the Venetian Marco Polo, whose reports, once discredited as the fables of a traveller, are now recognized among the sources of history, and especially of geographical knowledge.

Nobody can read them without feeling their verity.

From his habit of speaking of “millions” of people and “millions” of money, he was known as Messer Millioni, or the millionaire, being the earliest instance in history of a designation so common in our prosperous age.

But better than “millions” was the knowledge he imparted, and the impulse he gave to that science which teaches the configuration of the globe and the place of nations on its face.

Unquestionably it prepared the way for the two greatest geographical discoveries of modern times,--the Cape of Good Hope, by Vasco da Gama, and the New World, by Christopher Columbus.

He had not reached Cathay or the Grand Khan; but he had discovered a new world, destined in the history of civilization to be more than Cathay, and, in the lapse of time, to welcome the Ambassador of the Grand Khan.

This change is typical of the surpassing revolution under whose influence the Orient will become the Occident.