The San Francisco call., 1898-12-10
WHY PERJURY
 HAS NOT BEEN
 PUNISHED Means Employed by Slave Dealers. LIES TOLD WITH IMMUNITY BUREAU NOT AUTHORIZED TO ADMINISTER OATES. Strange Reluctance of Chief Mere dith to Comply With the Sug- gestion of Commissioner
 Heacock.
LIES TOLD WITH IMMUNITY
BUREAU NOT AUTHORIZED TO
 ADMINISTER OATES.

The following paragraph in the report of Secretary of the Treasury Gage, re- gently published, has occaSioned much surprise in Federal circles in this city:
 It is believed that many Chinese laborers have gained unlawful admission b. represent ing themselves to have been born in the United States. In such cases they present them selves to the customs officers at the frontier and seek arrest On being taken before the United States Commissioner for deportation proceed ings they frequently discharged on their own testimony and that of their alleged faith CTS. In many such testimony Is believed to have been untrue, and in number of in stances the applicants or the alleged fathers or both, have been successfully prosecuted for perjury.
 The surprising part of the paragraph is the assertion that in many cases the perjurers have been successfully prose- cuted. This statement is not applicable to California. There is only one such case on record in the Federal courts of this city, and that occurred eight years ago. In that instance, Doc" c. c. Higgins, white man, testified before the United States Commissioner that the applicant, a Chinaman, was born in this State. He Heynemann, were tried for perjury and were acquitted. No prosecution, either of white or Chinese, has been had since then, although the atmosphere of the courtroom and its very walls are reeking with perjury.
 During the present year many Chinese applicants for admission to this country have appeared before Commissioner Hea- cock and have fiatly contradicted the statements they had made previously to the Chinese bureau and the Collector of the Port. No prosecution would have availed in these cases, because the state- ments made by the applicants to the bu- reau had not been signed by them. Com missioner Heacock, alarmed at the ire committed in his court. urged Chief Mere dith of the Chinese bureau more than a year ago to have all the statements made by the witnesses before the bureau signed by the witnesses; but in spite of his re- peated requests this was not done until recently, and only after the Commissioner had complained of the action of the chief of the bureau and after the mem bers of the press had discovered the loop- hole through which so many Chinese la borers and slave girls had succeeded in obtaining admission to this State to com- pete with white labor and to fill the prisons.
 It is fact of peculiar significance that the records show that all of the numerous dith have been invariably against the Government and in favor of the Chinese slave-dealers. Of course, it is well un- derstood that the statements taken be- fore the bureau are not given under oath, and that perjury in the legal sense can not be committed; but the object of Com missioner Heacock in persistently de- manding that the statements be signed by the persons making them was to make the statements official and to discover dis crepancies between the sworn testimony before the bureau and the sworn testi- mony before the Commissioner, so that he could be the better able to judge of the truthfulness of the witnesses. Before the request of the Commissioner in this re- gard had been acceded to the Commission CT was obliged to rule out the transcript of the statements made before the bu- reau as not being competent testimony because of the absence of the signatures.
 False testimony on q material point made before the Commissioner is punished as perjury, but a statement made to the Collector of the Port or to the Chinese bureau is not, because neither ne Collect or nor the officers of the bureau have any legal authority to administer an oath in the matter of the landing of Chinese. This defect in the law has been called to the attention of Senators Perkins and White, and 1t is expected that Congress