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