Summarize this text: Protection For American Labor. We respectfully represent that American labor should not be exposed to the destructive competition of aliens who do not, will not, and can not take up the burdens of American citizenship, whose presence is an economic blight and a patriotic danger. It has been urged that the Chinese are unskilled and that they create wealth in field, mine, and forest, which ultimately redounds to the benefit of the white skilled workingman. The Chinese are skilled, and are capable of almost any skilled employment. They have invaded the cigar, shoe, broom, chemical, clothing, fruit canning, match making, woolen manufacturing industries, and have displaced more than 4,000 white men in these several employments in the city of San Francisco. Our opponents maintain that the admission of the Chinese would cause an enlargement of our national wealth and a great increase of production; but the distribution of wealth, not its production, is to-day our most serious public question. In this age of science and invention the production of wealth can well be left to take care of itself. It is its equitable distribution that must now be the concern of the country.
Welfare of Chinese Not Overlooked.
In an age when the brotherhood of man has become more fully recognized we are not prepared to overlook the welfare of the Chinese himself. We need have nothing on our national conscience, because the Chinese has a great industrial destiny in his own country. ...Let their merchants, travelers, and students, then, come here, as before, to carry back to China the benefits of our improvements and experiments. Let American ideas of progress and enterprise be planted on Chinese soil. Our commerce with China since 1880 has increased more than 50 per cent…. The United States buys more goods from China than does any other nation, and her total trade with China, exports and imports, equals that of Great Britain, not including the colonies, and is far ahead of that of any other country. Commerce is not sentimental and has not been affected by our policy of exclusion. Therefore every consideration of public duty, the nation’s safety and the people’s rights, the preservation of our civilization, and the perpetuity of our institutions, impel your memorialists to ask for the reenactment of the exclusion laws, which have for twenty years protected us against the gravest dangers, and which were they relaxed would imperil every interest which the American people hold sacred for themselves and their posterity.