tunate provinces and view the
problem at short range. The nearest and most accessible was Shansi
Province. It lies to the west and southwest of Peking, behind the blue
mountains which one sees from the Hankow-Peking Railroad. There seemed to
be no doubt that the opium curse could there be seen at its worst.
Everybody said so--legation officials, attaches, merchants, missionaries.
Dr. Piell, of the London Mission hospital at Peking, estimated that ninety
per cent. of the men, women, and children in Shansi smoke opium. He called
in one of his native medical assistants, who happened to be a Shansi man,
and the assistant observed, with a smile, that ninety per cent. seemed
pretty low as an estimate. Another point in Shansi's favour was that the
railroads were pushing rapidly through to T'ai Tuan-fu, the capital (and
one of the oldest cities in oldest China). So I picked up an interpreter
at the _Grand Hotel des Wagon-lits_, and went out there.

[Illustration: THE VILLAGES WERE LITTLE MORE THAN HEAPS OF RUINS These
Holes in the Ground are Occupied by Formerly Well-to-do Opium Smokers]

[Illustration: AT LAST HE CRAWLS OUT ON THE HIGHWAY, WHINING, CHATTERING
AND PRAYING THAT A FEW COPPER CASH BE THROWN TO HIM]

The new Shansi railroad was not completed through to Tai-Yuan-fu, the
provincial capital, and it was necessary to journey for several days by
cart and mule-litter. While this sort of travelling is not the most
comfortable in the world, it has the advantage of bringing one close to
the life that swarms along the highroad, and of making it easier to gather
facts and impressions.

Every hour or so, as the cart crawls slowly along, you come upon a dusty
gray village nestling in a hollow or clinging to the hillside. And nearly
every village is a little more than a heap of ruins. I was prepared to
find ruins, but not to such an extent. When I first drew John, the
interpreter's, attention to them, he said, "Too much years." As an
explanation this was not satisfactory, because many of the ruined
buildings were comparatively new--certainly, too new to fall to pieces. At
the second village John made another guess at the cause of such complete
disaster. "Poor--too poor," he said, and then traced it back to the last
famine, about which, he found, the peasants were still talking. "Whole lot
o' mens die," he explained. It was later on that I got at the main
contributing cause of the wreck and ruin which one finds almost everyw