tatement. The
published estimates of Dr. Du Bose, of Soochow, president of the
Anti-opium League, are much more conservative than those of Mr. Alex
Hosie, the British commercial _attache_ and former consul-general. Dr.
Parker, of Shanghai, the gentlemen of the London Mission, the American
Board, and the American Presbyterian Missions at Peking, scores of other
missionaries whom I saw in their homes in the interior or at the
missionary conference at Shanghai, and Messrs. Gaily, Robertson, and
Lewis, of the International Young Men's Christian Association, all
impressed me as men whose opinions were based on information and not on
prejudice. Dr. Morrison, the able Peking correspondent of the London
_Times_, said to me when I arrived at the capital, "You ought to talk with
the missionaries." I did talk with them, and among many different sources
of information I found them worthy of the most serious consideration.

The phrase, "opium province," means, in China, that an entire province
(which, in extent and in political outline, may be roughly compared to one
of the United States) has been ravaged and desolated by opium. It means
that all classes, all ages, both sexes, are sodden with the drug; that all
the richer soil, which in such densely-populated regions, is absolutely
needed for the production of food, is given over to the poppy; that the
manufacture of opium, of pipes, of lamps, and of the various other
accessories, has become a dominating industry; that families are wrecked,
that merchants lose their acumen, and labourers their energy; that after a
period of wide-spread debauchery and enervation, economic, as well as
moral and physical disaster, settles down over the entire region. The
population of these opium provinces ranges from fifteen or twenty million
to eighty million.

"In Shansi," I have quoted an official as saying, "everybody smokes
opium." Another cynical observer has said that "eleven out of ten Shansi
men are opium-smokers." In one village an English traveller asked some
natives how many of the inhabitants smoked opium, and one replied,
indicating a twelve-year-old child, "That boy doesn't." Still another
observer, an English scientist, who was born in Shansi, who speaks the
dialect as well as he speaks English, and who travels widely through the
remoter regions in search of rare birds and animals, puts the proportion
of smokers as low as seventy-five per cent. of the total population. I had
some talk