here
in Shansi Province, after I had picked up, through John and his cook, the
roadside gossip of many days during two or three hundred miles of travel,
after I had talked with missionaries of life-long experience, with
physicians who are devoting their lives to work among these misery-ridden
people, with merchants, travellers, and Chinese and Manchu officials.

Before we take up in detail the ravages of opium throughout this and other
provinces, I wish to say a word about one source of information, which
every observer of conditions in China finds, sooner or later, that he is
forced to employ. Along the China coast one hears a good deal of talk
about the "missionary question." Many of the foreign merchants abuse the
missionaries. I will confess that the "anti-missionary" side had been so
often and so forcibly presented to me that before I got away from the
coast I unconsciously shared the prejudice. But now, brushing aside the
exceptional men on both sides of the controversy, and ignoring for the
moment the deeper significance of it, let me give the situation as it
presented itself to me before I left China.

There are many foreign merchants who study the language, travel
extensively, and speak with authority on things Chinese. But the typical
merchant of the treaty port, that is, the merchant whom one hears so
loudly abusing the missionaries, does not speak the language. He transacts
most of his business through his Chinese "_Compradore_," and apparently
divides the chief of his time between the club, the race-track, and
various other places of amusement. This sort of merchant is the kind most
in evidence, and it is he who contributes most largely to the
anti-missionary feeling "back home." The missionaries, on the other hand,
almost to a man, speak, read, and write one or more native dialects. They
live among the Chinese, and, in order to carry on their work at all, they
must be continually studying the traditions, customs, and prejudices of
their neighbours. In almost every instance the missionaries who supplied
me with information were more conservative than the British and American
diplomatic, consular, military, and medical observers who have travelled
in the opium provinces. I have since come to the conclusion that the
missionaries are over-conservative on the opium question, probably
because, being constantly under fire as "fanatics" and "enthusiasts," they
unconsciously lean too far towards the side of under-s