ts topmost leaf is eighty-five feet from the ground. It has 464
aerial roots, as the branches which run down to the ground are
called, and the entire tree is 938 feet in circumference. It
is large enough to shelter an entire village under its foliage.

Several other remarkable trees are to be found in that garden.
One of them is called "The Crazy Tree," because about thirty-five
different varieties of trees have been grafted upon the same
trunk, and, as a consequence, it bears that many different kinds
of leaves. Its foliage suggests a crazy quilt.

Benares is the center of the opium traffic of India, which, next
to the land tax, is the most productive source of revenue to
the government. It is a monopoly inherited from the Moguls in
the middle ages and passed down from them through the East India
Company to the present government, and the regulations for the
cultivation, manufacture and sale of the drug have been very
little changed for several hundred years. There have been many
movements, public, private, national, international, religious
and parliamentary, for its suppression; there have been many
official inquiries and investigations; volumes have been written
setting forth all the moral questions involved, and it is safe
to say that every fact and argument on both sides has been laid
before the public; yet it is an astonishing fact that no official
commission or legally constituted body, not a single Englishman who
has been personally responsible for the well-being of the people of
India or has even had an influential voice in the affairs of the
empire or has ever had actual knowledge and practical experience
concerning the effects of opium, has ever advocated prohibition
either in the cultivation of the poppy or in the manufacture of
the drug. Many have made suggestions and recommendations for
the regulation and restriction of the traffic, and the existing
laws are the result of the experience of centuries. But anti-opium
movements have been entirely in the hands of missionaries, religious
and moral agitators in England and elsewhere outside of India,
and politicians who have denounced the policy of the government
to obtain votes against the party that happened to be in power.

This is an extraordinary statement, but it is true. It goes without
saying that the use of opium in any form is almost universally
considered one of the most dangerous and destructive of vices,
and it is not necessary in this connecti