under his orders, tried to close the saloons. It brings to mind other attempts in Europe and America, to check and control vice and depravity—attempts which have never, I think, been wholly successful—and one begins to understand the discouraging immensity of the task which China has undertaken. Really, to “stop using opium” would mean a very rearranging of the agricultural plan of the empire. It would make necessary an immediate solution of China’s transportation problem (no other crop is so easy to carry as opium) and an almost complete reconstruction of the imperial finances; indeed, few observers are so glib as to suggest offhand a substitute for the immense opium revenue to the Chinese government. And nobody to accomplish all this but those sodden officials, of whom it is safe to guess that fifty per cent have some sort or other of a financial stake in the traffic!

In the minds of most of us, I think, there has been a vague notion that the Chinese have always smoked opium, that opium is in some peculiar way a necessity to the Chinese constitution. Even among those who know the extraordinary history of this morbidly fascinating vegetable product, who know that the India-grown British drug was pushed and smuggled and bayoneted into China during a century of desperate protest and even armed resistance from these yellow people, it has been a popular argument to assert that the Chinese have only themselves to blame for the “demand” that made the trade possible. Of this “demand,” and of how it was worked up by Christian traders, we shall speak at some length in later chapters. “Educational methods” in the extending of trade can hardly be said to have originated with the modern trust. The curious fact is that the Chinese didn’t use opium and didn’t want opium.

Your true opium-smoker stretches himself on a divan and gives up ten or fifteen minutes to preparing his thimbleful of the brown drug. When it has been heated and worked to the proper consistency, he places it in the tiny bowl of his pipe, holds it over a lamp, and draws a few whiffs of the smoke deep into his lungs. It seems, at first, a trivial thing; indeed, the man who is well fed and properly housed and clothed seems able to keep it up for a considerable time and without appreciable ill results. The greater difficulty in China is, of course, that very few opium-smokers are well fed and properly housed and clothed.

I heard little about the beautiful dreams and visions which opium is supposed to bring; all the smokers with whom I talked could be roughly divided into two classes—those who smoked in order to relieve pain or misery, and those miserable victims who smoked to relieve the acute physical distress brought on by the opium itself. Probably the majority of the victims take it up as a temporary relief; many begin in early childhood; the mother will give the baby a whiff to stop its crying. It is a social vice only among the upper classes. The most notable outward effect of this indulgence is the resulting physical weakness and lassitude. The opium-smoker cannot work hard; he finds it difficult to apply his mind to a problem or his body to a task. As the habit becomes firmly fastened on him, there is a perceptible weakening of his moral fibre; he shows himself unequal to emergencies which make any sudden demand upon him. If opium is denied him, he will lie and steal in order to obtain it.

Opium-smoking is a costly vice. A pipefull of a moderately good native product costs more than a labourer can earn in a day; consequently the poorer classes smoke an unspeakable compound based on pipe scrapings and charcoal. Along the highroads the coolies even scrape the grime from the packsaddles to mix with this dross. The clerk earning from twenty-five to fifty Mexican dollars a month will frequently spend from ten to twenty dollars a month on opium. The typical confirmed smoker is a man who spends a considerable part of the night in smoking himself to sleep, and all the next morning in sleeping off the effects. If he is able to work at all, it is only during the afternoon, and even at that there will be many days when the official or merchant is incompetent to conduct his affairs. Thousands of prominent men are ruined every year.

The Cantonese have what they call “The Ten Cannots regarding The Opium-Smoker.” “He cannot (1) give up the habit; (2) enjoy sleep; (3) wait for his turn when sharing his pipe with his friends; (4) rise early; (5) be cured if sick; (6) help relations in need; (7) enjoy wealth; (8) plan anything; (9) get credit even when an old customer; (10) walk any distance.”

This is the land into which the enterprising Christian traders introduced opium, and into which they fed opium so persistently and forcibly that at last a “good market” was developed. England did not set out to ruin China. One finds no hint of a diabolical purpose to seduce and destroy a wonderful old empire on the other side of the world. The ruin worked was incidental to that far Eastern trade of which England has been so proud. It was the triumph of the balance sheet over common humanity.

And so it is to-day. British India still holds the cream of the trade, for the Chinese grown opium cannot compete in quality with the Indian drug. The British Indian government raises the poppy in the rich Ganges Valley (more than six hundred thousand acres of poppies they raised there last year), manufactures it in government factories at Patna and Ghazipur—manufactures four-fifths of it especially to suit the Chinese taste, and sells it at annual government auctions in Calcutta.

The result of this traffic is so very grave that it is a difficult matter to discuss in moderate language. To the traveller who leaves the railroad and steamboat lines and ventures, in springless native cart or swaying mule litter, along the sunken roads and the hills of western and northwestern China, the havoc and misery wrought by the “white man’s smoke,” the “foreign dust,” becomes unpleasantly evident. Some hint of the meaning of it, a faint impression of the terrible devastation of this drug—let loose, as it has been, on a backward, poverty-stricken race—is seared, hour by hour and day by day into his brain.

A terrible drama is now being enacted in the Far East. The Chinese race is engaged in a fight to a finish with a drug—and the odds are on the drug.

II

THE GOLDEN OPIUM DAYS

In the splendid, golden days of the East India Company, the great Warren Hastings put himself on record in these frank words:

“Opium is a pernicious article of luxury, which ought not to be permitted but for the purpose of foreign commerce only.” The new traffic promised to solve the Indian fiscal problem, if skillfully managed; accordingly, the production and manufacture of opium was made a government monopoly. China, after all, was a long way off—and Chinamen were only Chinamen. That the East India Company might be loosing an uncontrollable monster not only on China but on the world hardly occurred to the great Warren Hastings—the British chickens might, a century later, come home to roost in Australia and South Africa was too remote a possibility even for speculative inquiry.

Now trade supports us, governs us, controls our dependencies, represents us at foreign courts, carries on our wars, signs our treaties of peace. Trade, like its symbol the dollar, is neither good nor bad; it