f the great provinces, leaving everywhere on plastic minds
distinct and ineffaceable impressions of their manners, business methods,
and morals.

In the foreign settlement of Shanghai, and apart from the population of
the native city which adjoins it, there are, roughly, 450,000 Chinese who
have chosen to dwell in the territory and under the laws of the white men.
This population is not fixed, but fluctuates as the floating element comes
and goes; and everywhere that this floating element travels when out of
the city it leaves an impression--a story, a bit of gossip, an example of
the sharp dealing learned from the foreigner--of the manners, business
methods, and morals of Shanghai. The native newspapers comment frankly on
life and conditions in the great seaport, and their comments are reprinted
in the papers of the interior. Shanghai exerts a direct and
result-breeding influence on fifty to seventy-five million native minds,
and an indirect influence on all China. How many scores of fair-minded,
straightforward merchants, how many thousands of scattered missionaries
and teachers will it take, think you, to counteract that influence?

China, grappling with the problem of decay, fighting desperately against
an evil which the most nearly Christian of the Christian nations has
fastened on her, looks westward for enlightenment, and sees--Shanghai. And
Shanghai--well Shanghai plays the races and the roulette wheel, and
drinks, and forgets the sacred significance of marriage and the economic
importance of the home, and goes to the club, and except in casting up
profits gives never a thought to that vast, muttering populace that
waits--waits--for the day of the under-dog to come.

Such was the condition of things when the Chinese war on opium began to
assume effective proportions during the spring of 1906. Now, Shanghai--the
"settlement," that is--was in a peculiar, an unfortunate, condition as
regarded the anti-opium crusade. I have already given, in an earlier
chapter, the estimate of Robert E. Lewis, general secretary of the Y. M.
C. A., at Shanghai, that there were, in 1906, nearly 22,000 places in the
international settlement, little and big, where opium could be purchased,
more than 19,000 of which kept pipes, lamps, and divans on the premises
for smokers. All of the dens which were openly conducted were paying a
regular license fee to the municipal government, amounting last year to
98,000 Shanghai taels, or about $70