GOVERNMENT DEFENSE OF MISSIONARIES.
A great deal of nonsense has appeared in the secular press of this country since the riots in Chentu and Kucheng as to the duty of the United States Government to demand redress for injury done to person and property of missionaries. Even such rubbish has found place in influential newspapers as that affording protection to missionaries and missionary property is propagating religion by the sword. So far as missionaries are concerned, they go to these foreign fields fully aware that they are liable to be harmed by such outbreaks. We are not aware that the missionaries from America ever asked government aid or protection in the prosecution of their calling. If they obtain it, it is on the basis that they are American citizens. It might be possible that they would advance their influence more by not demanding redress at all. Native Christian Chinese have over and over refused indemnity proffered by the authorities for injuries to person and property. They gained greatly in influence as religionists among the people thereby. There may be occasions when missionaries might choose to do likewise. The missionaries in Uganda gained great triumphs while absolutely unprotected to any degree by the British Government. The Gospel can win its way without patronage of any political powers. But no state can afford to see its subjects unprotected. This, regardless of their calling, whether missionary, merchant, or bicyclist reporter. The British Government in one instance spent millions to defend a single one of its subjects—and he a Jew! The person and property of the citizen of any country must be held to be absolutely inviolate in every other country. Thus missionaries as citizens or subjects must be protected by their governments, not for missionary interests, but for the prestige of the government. Whatever the missionary may choose to do or not to do in the case, when wronged or harmed, the government has no alternative. It must protect an American citizen, though he be a Jew, Moslem, or Buddhist propagandist, or whatever else, in any part of the globe. A government that does not do that, or attempt to do it, is not worth owning.—Missionary Review. Then what about a government that will not protect its citizens at home when state laws deprive them of rights nominally guaranteed by the national Constitution? What about a government that will spend thousands of dollars to protect one citizen (Martin Kosta) in a foreign land (Austria) in his civil rights, but will not so much as interfere by judicial decision to protect scores of citizens of home states when deprived by state laws of the rights of conscience in religious matters? Where is the consistency of calling upon a government to procure redress for its citizens who in their capacity of missionaries are insulted and injured by heathen in foreign countries, when it allows professed Christians and state governments to insult and injure (under pretext of state law) other citizen missionaries at home?