6th Sept. Tine article in these columns a short time ago in which we endeavoured to give, in reply to a letter in an Indian paper, what we believe to be the truth about opium, has elicited a very comprehensive answer from a correspondent in the interior, which will be found in another column. It is a thoroughly temperate letter, but we doubt if it will convince those who look at the question dispassionately. lhe writer seems to us to have fallen into the common error of confounding the use of the drug wi its abuse. Not that there is anything in the article commending the wse of opium. What we wrote was: "Opium is just as much a cirse to China as intoxicating drinks are to England and by this we stand. We hold that the vast majority who use intoxicating drivks in England are not injured by them, though the few who abuse them are; and the case is the same with opi in China. We hold those men to be fanatics who would prevent the use of liquor at all in England, because a few meu are ruined by its abuse; and we hold those men to be fanatics who write of China being devastated, and the people ruined, by the use of opium. We can see for ourselves that the Chinese people as a whole are healthy, hardy, and contented; and the speed with which the population increases, when it is not checked by natural calamities like floods and droughts, is an unanswerable proof that the race as a whole is not injured by opium.
As to the question whether the Hongkong Colonial Surgeon is right in saying that the opium smoker can have his indulgence summarily cut off without suffering physically; or the medical missionaries are right who assert that abstinence from the drug is invariably accompanied by intense mental and physical distress; we are quite ready to proceed on the principles of every court of ji, and we are sure that the verdict will be on the side of the colonial surgeon, that enforced abstinonce from opium is not necessarily accompanied by intense physical distress. As to mental distress we have said nothing; no doubt the opium swoker when denied his pipe at the usual time does feel mental distress, as the tobacco smoker does if his cigar is suddenly cut off. A thousand opium smokers who come into the medical missionary's hospital to be cured of opium, and who represent that they are suffering intense physical pangs, cannot outweigh the involuntary testi-many of the prisoners in Hongkong gaol. These latter, however much they may complain and beg for a pipe, show no symptonrs of physical suffering, they improve in appearance and, though only on the ordinary prison diet, gain weight. The scales are a witness that is absolutely unprejudiced.
It is quite a mistake to imagine that there are few foreigners, other than who "have intercourse ese except on business or that their intercourse with the natives is restricted to the compra-dare, the shroff, and the boy. In the first place, there are the members of the consular and customs services, who form a considerable part of the foreign population of China, and who speak Chinese, and mix with Chinamen of all classes. Then there are many more members of the commercial class in China, foreigners, who speak Chinese more of less, than our correspondent seems to imagine. They travel, they constantly go up country, they have eyes and ears and they use them; and there is hardly one of them who is directly or indirectly interested pecuniarily in the question. But they see for themselves when they travel, and when they go up country, that opium has neither devastated the country, nor ruined the people. We may appeal to the testimony of an old resident in Ps, China, who speaks the language, who has mixed and mixes with all classes of the people, and who is entirely unbiassed, the author of Through the Yangtze Gorges. His evidence confirms our preliminary statement that opium much a curse in China, as drink is in England. The working man, who lives from hand to mouth, has to deny himself food to buy opium, and suffers accordingly, just as the working man who patrouises the beer-shop or the gin-palace does at home. A few sue-cump to the yi, or passionate craving for the drug mentioned by our corres pondent, a vice analogous fo dipsomania with ourselves. "In the absence of the yin all Chinamen will tell you that opium-smoking is a harmless though foolish pastime." Ihe contention that every moderate smoker will become in time possessed by the yin we hold to be no more true than the contention that every moderate drinker will in time become a drunkard: nor is it bad reasoning or bad taste to call those who support these contentions "fanatics" It 1s arguable, though to us it seems unreasonable, that the moderate use of drink or opium should be altogether abandoned, because a few abuse them; but as long as human nature is what it is, a certain proportion of humanity will go to ruin in some way or other; as we find some of the missionaries themselves—and we are sorry to see Dr. Dudgeon among the number—curing the opium habit by means of opium pills; that is, substituting opium-eating, a secret vice, for opium-smoking, an open one.
"Fair Play" accuses us of "upholding a practice which is destroying thousands of Chinese, wasting property, blighting homes, and threatens as it goes on to ruin the nation." We do not uphold the practice, nor do we allow that its effects are correctly described. We have simply tried to tell the trath about opium as a Chinese visitor to England wight tell the truth about drink, If he were to say that he found that a great number of people took drink in modera~ tion and had no harm frow it, while a few abused it, would it be fair tu accuse him of " upholding a practice. which is destroying thousands of English, wasting property, blighting homes, and threatens as it goes on to ruin the nation"?
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.