han 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 has no
patriotism, no morals, no humanity. Its logic applies with the same
relentless force and precision to corn, cotton, rice, wheat, human slaves,
oil, votes, opium. It is the power that drives human affairs; and its law
is the law of the balance sheet. So long as any commodity remains in the
currents of trade the law of trade must reign, the balance sheet must
balance. It is d