at about every other man in the city
was a smoker. "It is practically a case of everybody smoking," he
concluded.

Twenty-five years ago, when the consumption of opium in China could hardly
have been more than half what it is to-day, a British consul estimated the
proportion of smokers in the region he had visited as follows: "Labourers
and small farmers, ten per cent.; small shopkeepers, twenty per cent.;
soldiers, thirty per cent.; merchants, eighty per cent.; officials and
their staff, ninety per cent.; actors, prostitutes, vagrants, thieves,
ninety-five per cent." The labourers and farmers, the real strength of
China, as of every other land, had not yet been overwhelmed--but they were
going under, even then. The most startling news to-day is from these lower
classes, even from the country villages, the last to give way. Dr. Parker,
the American Methodist missionary at Shanghai, informed me that reports to
this effect were coming in steadily from up country; and during my own
journey I heard the same bad news almost everywhere along a route which
measured, before I left China, something more than four thousand miles.

Perhaps the most convincing summing up of China's predicament is found in
another translation from a recent Chinese document, this time an appeal to
the throne from four viceroys. The quaintness of the language does not, I
think, impair its effectiveness and its power as a protest: "China can
never become strong and stand shoulder and shoulder with the powers of the
world unless she can get rid of the habit of opium-smoking by her
subjects, about one quarter of whom have been reduced to skeletons and
look half-dead."

This then is the curse which the imperial government has talked so
quaintly of "abandoning." This is the debauchery which is to be put down
by officials, ninety per cent of whom were supposed to be more or less
confirmed smokers. Such almost childlike optimism brings to mind a certain
Sunday in New York City when Theodore Roosevelt, with the whole police
force under his orders, tried to close the saloons. It brings to mind
other attempts in Europe and America, to check and control vice and
depravity--attempts which have never, I think, been wholly
successful--and one begins to understand the discouraging immensity of the
task which China has undertaken. Really, to "stop using opium" would mean
a very rearranging of the agricultural plan of the empire. It would make
necessary an immediate