This is a very long speech; it stretched over 2 days. It was occasioned by discussion of legislation on Chinese exclusion. James G. Maguire (1853-1920) represented San Francisco in Congress from 1893 to 1899. Georgists are acquainted with him in part because of his writings in The Standard, Henry George's weekly newspaper, including the 1887 speech to the Anti-Poverty Society in NYC in which Judge Maguire spoke of seeing the cat, which soon became a shorthand for that AHA! moment when one starts to see the full beauty of Henry George's ideas.
I've seen parts of this speech in various places, but don't always see what I think is the most important and remarkable part of it.
The situation Congressman Maguire describes in San Francisco is dramatic, and one can see why explaining the situation to his mostly East Coast colleagues in Congress was a challenge.
In the district which I represent there is a vastly greater number of adult Chinese male population than of adult males of the Caucasian race, citizens and aliens combined. That is the situation there. That was true of the whole city of San Francisco, according to the statistics, until quite recently. I believe it to be the condition in San Francisco now. I believe the census returns of Chinese population in San Francisco to be wholly and grossly inaccurate.
At the end of the first section, we get a hint of where the speech is going.
You see the hardships imposed by our Federal laws upon the Chinese, and your sympathies go out to them because you do not see the other side of the picture. We see the oppression, misery, degradation, and slavery to which our own laborers are reduced as a direct result of Chinese immigration. We see that the imported Chinese coolies are mere agencies in the hands of monopolists—domestic and foreign—by which our own people are gradually reduced to a condition of wretchedness approximating to the social condition of the Chinese slaves, and without the slightest feeling of malice against the unfortunate Chinamen we demand their exclusion and their deportation as necessary measures of defense to our own people.