all, give up the trade, stop the production in India, and make the great step unnecessary. But England could not see it in that light. China wavered, then took the great step. The restrictions on opium-growing were removed. This was probably a mistake, though opinions still differ about that. To the men who stood responsible for a solution of Chinese fiscal problem it doubtless seemed necessary. At all events, the last barrier between China and ruin was removed by the Chinese themselves. And within less than half a century after the native growth of the poppy began, the white and pink and mauve blossoms have spread across the great empire, north and south, east and west, until to-day, in blossom-time almost every part of every province has its white and mauve patches. You may see them in Manchuria, on the edge of the great desert of Gobi, within a dozen miles of Peking; you may see them from the headwaters of the mighty Yangtse to its mouth, up and down the coast for two thousand miles, on the distant borders of Thibet.
No one knows how much opium was grown in China last year. There are estimates – official, missionary, consular; and they disagree by thousands and tens of thousands of tons. But it is known that where the delicate poppy is reared, it demands and receives the best land. It thrives in the rich river-bottoms. It has crowded out grain and vegetables wherever it has spread, and has thus become a contributing factor to famines. Its product, opium, has run over China like a black wave, leaving behind it a misery, a darkness, a desolation that has struck even the Chinese, even its victims, with horror. China has passed from misery to disaster. And as if the laws of trade had chosen to turn capriciously from their inexorable business and wreak a grim joke on a prostrate race, the solution, the great step, has failed in its purpose. The trade in Indian opium has been hurt, to be sure, but not supplanted. It will never be supplanted until the British government deliberately puts it down. For the Chinese cannot raise opium which competes in quality with the Indian drug. Indian opium is in steady demand for the purpose of mixing with Chinese opium. No duties can keep it out; duties simply increase the cost to the Chinese consumer, simply ruin him a bit more rapidly. So authoritative an expert as Sir Robert Hart, director of the Chinese imperial customs, had hoped that the great step would prove effective. In “These from the Land of Sinim” he has expressed his hope:
“Your legalized opium has been a cure in every province it penetrates, and your refusal to limit or decrease the import has forced us to attempt a dangerous remedy – legalized native opium – not because we approve of it, but to compete with and drive out the foreign drug; and it is expelling it, and when we have only the native production to deal with, and thus have the business in our own hands, we hope to stop the habit in our own way.”
The great step has failed. Indian opium has not been expelled. For the Chinese to put down the native drug without stopping the import is impossible as well as useless. The Chinese seem determined, in one way or another, to put down both. Once, again, after a weary century of struggle, they have approached the British government. Once again the British government has been driven from the Scylla of healthy Anglo-Saxon moral indignation to the Charybdis behind that illuminating phrase – “India needs the money.” Twenty million dollars is a good deal of money. The balance sheet reigns; and the balance sheet is an exacting ruler, even if it has triumphed over common decency, over common morality, over common humanity.
Will you ride with me (by rickshaw) along the International Bund at Shanghai – beyond the German Club and the Hongkong Bank – over the little bridge that leads to Frenchtown – past a half mile of warehouses and chanting coolies and big yellow Hankow steamers – until we turn out on the French Bund? It is a raw, cloudy, March morning; the vendors of queer edibles who line the curbing find it warmer to keep their hands inside their quilted sleeves.
It is a lively day on the river. Admiral Brownson’s fleet of white cruisers lie at anchor in midstream. A lead-gray British cruiser swings below them, an anachronistic Chinese gunboat lower still. Big black merchantmen fill in the view – a P. and O. ship is taking on coal – a two-hundred-ton junk with red sails moves by. Nearer at hand, from the stone quay outward, the river front is crowded close with sampans and junks, rows on rows of them, each with its round little house of yellow matting, each with its swarm of brown children, each with its own pungent contribution to the all-pervasive odour. Gaze out through the forests of masts, if you please, and you will see two old hulks, roofed with what looks suspiciously like shingles, at anchor beyond. They might be ancient men-of-war, pensioned off to honourable decay. You can see the square outline of what once were portholes, boarded up now. The carved, wooden figure-heads at the prow of each are chipped and blackened with age and weather. What are they and why do they lie here in mid-channel, where commerce surges about them?
These are the opium hulks of Shanghai. In them is stored the opium which the government of British India has grown and manufactured for consumption in China. They symbolize China’s degradation.
III
A GLIMPSE INTO AN OPIUM PROVINCE
The opium provinces of China – that is, the provinces which have been most nearly completely ruined by opium – lie well back in the interior. They cover, roughly, an area 1,200 miles long by half as wide, say about one-third the area of the United States; and they support, after a fashion, a population of about 160,000,000. There had been plenty of evidence obtainable at Shanghai, Hankow, Peking, and Tientsin, of the terrible ravages of opium in these regions, but it seemed advisable to make a journey into one of these unfortunate 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, attachés, 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.
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 everywhere 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
