Wume the members of the Anglo-Oriental Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade are weeping and wailing and gnashing their tooth over the continuance of the traffic in Indian drug carried on at the open ports in Ching, they are, perhaps unconsciously, blind to the extension which habits of opium consumption have of late years assumed among white races. We have not been able to make out clearly whether the persons who in Eugland acquire a craving for opiam abandon for it their alcoholic tastes.
There is no & prion reason that we know of why they should, but the fact that opium consuming races are seldom or never addicted to alcoholic excesses makes it probable that there is something mutually exclusive in the habits. In point of individual degradation, followed by the debasement and extinction of offspring, there is seemingly little to choose between the two, The far-reaching results of intemperance are in both eases nearly alike; alike too are the effects quickly and invariably exhibited. An opium consumer is, it is true, likely to be stupid rather than violent during his fit of intoxication, but his fall into incapacity to discharge his duties to his family and to the State is, if any. thing, more certain than in the case of adrankard. The task of curing the craving which leads to excess in one direction or the other is little, if at all, short of hopeless. There is something in the fact thet alcohol in moderation has its uses within the healthy economy whichopiumhasnot. The chances therefore are that the man who has become a slave to opium possesses an appetite more fundamentally vitiated than that which curses the slave to alcohol. These and many other considerations of a like kind make the trath or falsehood of assertions as to the spread of the opiam habit in England and America a very serious question indeed; far more serious, it appears to us, than the main. tenance of the practice of opium-smoking among the Chinese. Nob that abstractedly considered the fate of one human being is not as justly reason for solicitude as the fate of any other, but because the average temperament of the races being vastly different, the effects of the vice are likely to be more serious in the one case than in the other. In England the matter has received little attention. Not so in the United States, where official reporters have been for several months employed in collecting facts abontthe opium habit, and coudensing them into a manageable shape. We have before us the figures drawn from ninety-six cities, villages and townships of the State of Michigan, and these may be taken as fairly representative of enormous areas, if not of the whole country. From the tables it appears that about six out of every thousand inhabitants of the State are opium eaters, including under this name the consumers of morphia, and of all the varieties of opiate tinctures and extracts. Of these six individuals three and a third are women, two and two. thirds men, The average amount consumed by each opium eater in Michigan is one ounce per week, the equivalent of about one pint of laudanum. It is probable, however, that these figures are set too low, as the druggists from whom they were collected frequently protested against the attempt to violate their confidential relations with their customers, Taken as maximum estimates they are startling evongh. But that they do err by defect is rendered certain by the great demand which exists for so-called "antidotes for the opiam habit," all of which are preparations of opium or morphia in disguise, sold at enormous prices. Testimony is unanimous as to the effect of the vice. One reporter who has many opium eaters in his
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.