ness along "the Coast" we shall glimpse for an instant or so,
now and then, a face that looks distressingly like the face of old
Respectability himself. I have found myself in momentary bewilderment when
walking through the splendid masonry-lined streets of Hongkong, when
sitting beneath the frescoed ceiling of that pinnacled structure that
houses the most nearly Christian of parliaments, trying to believe that
this opium drama can be real. And I have wondered, and puzzled, until a
smell like the smell of China has come floating to the nostrils of memory;
until a picture of want and disease and misery--of crawling, swarming
human misery unlike anything which the untravelled Western mind can
conceive--has appeared before the eyes of memory. I have thought of those
starving thousands from the famine districts creeping into Chinkiang to
die, of those gaunt, seemed faces along the highroad that runs
southwestward from Peking to Sian-fu; I have thought of a land that knows
no dentistry, no surgery, no hygiene, no scientific medicine, no
sanitation; of a land where the smallpox is a lesser menace beside the
leprosy, plague, tuberculosis, that rage simply at will, and beside
famines so colossal in their sweep, that the overtaxed Western mind simply
refuses to comprehend them. And De Quincey's words have come to me: "What
was it that drove me into the habitual use of opium? Misery--blank
desolation--settled and abiding darkness----?" These words help to clear
it up. China was a wonderful field, ready prepared for the ravages of
opium--none better. The mighty currents of trade did the rest. The
balance sheet reigned supreme as by right. The balance sheet reigns
to-day.

But we must get on with our narrative. I will try to pass it along in the
form in which it has presented itself to me. If Clean and Dirty appear in
closer and more puzzling alliance than we like to see them, I cannot help
that.

It was not easy getting opium, the commodity, into the currents of trade.
There was an obstacle. The Chinese were not an opium-consuming race. They
did not use opium, they did not want opium, they steadily resisted the
inroads of opium. But the rulers of the company were far-seeing men. Tempt
misery long enough and it will take to opium. Two centuries ago when small
quantities of the drug were brought in from Java, the Chinese government
objected. In 1729 the importation was prohibited. As late as 1765, this
importation, carried on by en