Mr. Tsui Kwo Yin to Mr. Gresham.
Washington, D. C. , April 29, 1893 . (Received May 1.)
Sir: I had the honor to address you on the 13th of March last and again on the 13th instant on the subject of the apprehension by the Chinese subjects throughout the United States of the anticipated personal violence and destruction of their property that the evil-disposed persons, through race hatred, might inflict upon them by making the threatened enforcement of the act of May 5, 1892, the occasion for that purpose; but up to this moment I have received no reply from your excellency on this point.
I have now the honor to inform you that I am in receipt of a telegram from the Chinese Merchants’s Exchange—Chung Wah Way Koon—of San Francisco, Cal., of date the 28th instant, in which is conveyed to [Page 249] me, from this most reliable and trustworthy source, the information that when the deportation act of May 5, 1892, shall go into effect as a law the Chinese residents and citizens of the city of San Francisco and vicinity will be subjected to personal violence and to the destruction of their property by persons of other nationalities who do not agree with them in the course they have pursued in regard to the said act of Congress. I do feel greatly alarmed at this state of things, and therefore consider it my duty to advise you of the imminent danger which threatens my people and their property in the localities named, and to ask the United States Government to protect them therefrom.
I would most respectfully ask you, therefore, to take such steps on behalf of the United States as to you may seem proper to avoid the anticipated personal violence and destruction of property, and also that you invoke the proper assistance from the governor and other local authorities of the State of California for the same purpose, to the end that such Chinese residents may be protected and their rights maintained against such personal violence and destruction of property.
I would also suggest that the governor of the State of Montana has, as I am advised, approved an unjust bill, which forbids all citizens of that State from holding commercial intercourse with the Chinese residents there. Thus by this act there is good reason to believe that the anticipated ill-treatment and outrage so much dreaded by the Chinese has at least begun to show its effect.
Accept, etc.,