another $3,000,000 for miscellaneous debts, and $6,000,000 for the destroyed opium. After this the contraband traffic went on as before.

The Emperor Taou-Kwang steadfastly refused to legalize it. "Nothing will induce me," he said, "to derive a revenue from the vice and misery of my people." And when Captain Hope, of H. M. S. Thalia, stopped two or three opium ships above Shanghai, he was recalled by Lord Palmerston and ordered to India, "where he could not interfere in such a manner with the undertakings of British subjects."

Commissioner Lin wrote pathetic letters to Queen Victoria on the subject. "We would now concert with your Honorable Sovereignty means to Bring to a perpetual end this opium traffic, so hurtful

Yet always under protest. The Chinese Foreign Minister in 1869 suggested China should grow her own opium rather than import it from India. "We do not want to do it," he said, "but we are driven to it." About this time the situation was admirably summed up by Sir Robert Hart, G. C. M. G., Inspector General of the Imperial Maritime Customs since 1859, and the most interesting and influential foreigner in all the Chinese Empire.

"The position the Chinese take up," Sir Robert says, "is this: "We did not invite you foreigners here. You crossed the seas of your own accord and forced yourselves upon us. To the trade we sanctioned you added opium smuggling, and when we tried to stop this, you made war on us. Your legalized opium has

been a curse in every province it penetrated; and your refusal to limit or decrease the import has forced us to a dangerous remedy. We have legalized native opium, not because we approve of it, but rather to compete with and drive out the foreign drug. And it is expelling it. When we have only the native product to deal with and the business in our own hands, be sure we will stop it in our own way.'"

To this forceful summary the Tsungli-Yamen added: "The Chinese merchant supplies your country with his goodly tea and silk, thus conferring a benefit on her; but in return the British merchant empoisons China with pestilent opium." Sir Rutherford Alcock, then Minister in China, read this document to a committee of the House of Commons in 1871, and declared that the Chinese ministers "were ready to enter into any arrangement for the stoppage of the traffic, irrespective of the large revenue they were deriving from it." No answer was ever returned.

Today 700,000 acres of land carries the opium poppy in India; and it is the only crop on which the Government advances money when the seed is sown. In Bengal, opium is cultivated under licenses granted to individuals or to the head - men of groups, by officers of the opium department. When it is extracted, the cultivators deliver it to the district opium officers, when it is sent down to the two great Government factories in Bengal for manufacture. In due time the drug is sent to Calcutta to be sold at the monthly auctions. Each season the Government is notified how many chests will be sent to market, and the price

is fixed by auction. Thus does the unholy traffic go on year after year.

The entire opium industry of India is worth in round figures $50,000,000 a year; and while the bulk of the drug goes to China enormous quantities are taken by the Straits Settlements, Borneo and Indo-China. But it is the special taste of the Chinese that is most considered in the processes of manufacture. Quite apart from the opium grown and manufactured in British India, however, there is also a great output of the "Malwa" variety, grown in the native and protected states by means of money advanced by Bombay speculators and wealthy merchants of Central India.

All Malwa opium from Baroda and Rajutana must pass through British ter

AN OPIUM SHOP IN INDIA.

ritory on its way to Bombay for export to China; and a transit duty is levied on every one hundred and forty pound chest by the Government. This duty once stood at 700 rupees per chest, but this was reduced ten years ago to 500 rupees, as the trade was falling off. Now, about the actual manufacture. Crude opium is brought in from the country in earthen pans to a Government examining hall. Here its consistency is tested either by the touch or by thrusting a scoop into the

mass.

Next a sample from each pot, which is numbered and labeled, is further examined for purity in the chemical testingroom. The next department is the mixing rooms, where the contents of the earthen pans are thrown into immense vats and mixed by means of blind rakes until the whole has become a homogeneous paste. It is then taken to the balling room, where it is made into those balls so familiar to every traveler in China.

The ball-makers are furnished with a small table, a stool and a brass cup for

shaping, besides a certain quantity of opium and water called "lewa," and an allowance of poppy petals in which to roll the opium balls. An expert hand will turn out more than 100 balls a day, all of precisely the same weight.

The drying room comes next; and here the balls are placed to dry in small earthenware cups before being stacked. White examiners go round to examine them, and puncture with a sharp steel those in which gas from fermentation may be forming. And lastly there is the stacking room, where the balls are packed for transit to Calcutta and Bombay, en route to China.

Here one may see hundreds of Hindu boys, turning, airing, and examining the opium balls. They clear them of mildew, moths or insects by rubbing them with the petal dust of the poppy.

I have said that for many years China has grown opium herself; and the culture is especially extensive in Si-Chuen. Here it is increasingly cultivated in the first harvest, and ripens in April or May. Thus it is cleared from the ground in

time for rice, maize or meal to follow in the greater summer heat. But the increasing consumption of opium has led to rice and corn fields being planted with the poppy; and there is no doubt in my mind that this accounts for the many terrible famines that have afflicted China of late years.

In the Kiang-Peh Province 15,000,000 Chinese were reported starving recently, and consuls and missionaries estimated it would cost $1,250,000 merely to relieve the pressing need. Mr. Rodgers, our Consul-General at Shanghai, received $25,000 as a first installment towards relief work.

It is no wonder the Chinese Government want to sweep away the poppy altogether and grow good food in its place. No one pretends that opium. smoking is anything else but a real blight. Notwithstanding India's persistent efforts to force it upon China, I notice that Australia and New Zealand absolutely prohibit importation of the drug, save for medical purposes. And in the Transvaal,

elsewhere. The Japanese we learned feared opium as we fear the rattlesnake, and they are stamping it out in Formosa. The net result of our opium commission was that the use of the drug was recognized as an evil for which no financial gain could compensate. And a strict law was passed that there should be prohibition in the Philippines after next year, so far as Chinamen are concerned. For opium is a narcotic poison. First comes exhilaration and excitement, and after that deep depression, such as marked the classic cases of De Quincey and Coleridge.

Paralysis of the brain, coma and death inevitably follow. These were the symptoms attested by 5,000 doctors who signed a declaration on the subject in 1892. Its effects are terribly visible on

all hands in China where parents will actually sell their children into slavery to get the drug. British Consul-General Hosie, speaking of the Si-Chuen Province, with its population of 47,000,000, writes as follows: "I am well within the mark when I say that in the cities fifty per cent of the males and twenty per cent of the females smoke; while the ratio in the country stands at twenty-five and five respectively."

I myself have seen entire populations given over to opium smoking in Yunan; and I never met a missionary, white trader, or Chinese gentleman of the educated classes who defended the drug's use for a moment. And there is yet another side dealt with by Chester Holcombe, sometime United States Minister at Pekin. "One result of the opium trade," he says, "is the intense hatred of all things and all men foreign. The Chinese from their point of view have been attacked and overcome by an unknown and necessarily inferior race for the sake of the money which was to be made by forcing a deadly poison upon them. Is there any other explanation necessary of the anti-foreign feeling in the Chinese Empire?"

But there seem to be signs of better things; and already efforts are being made to restore the vast and magnificent province of Si-Chuen to her ancient grain-growing prominence, so disastrously upset of late years by the invasion of the poppy, which like a noxious weed has run over the whole land. On all hands opium remedies are being called for; and to my own knowledge a young Chinese druggist has made a fortune out of the leaves of a certain creeper which he discovered acciden