June 6.
THERE are many unpleasant evidences that there is a revival of opium smoking in China. Reports from the Mixed Court tell of continual prosecutions for smuggling and those who are in a position to; know declare that the amount of opium smuggled into the settlement is incredibly large. Those who, for business or pleasure, have occasion to visit Chinese restaurants and tea-houses inform us that the pipe is almost as much in evidence now as it was in the days before prohibition was enforced. Scarcely a bargain is struck or a contract signed without the document being first fumigated with the incense smoke from the little lamp that lights the path down the broad way that leadeth to destruction.
Tt is not a very long time to look back to the days when antiopium agitation was a favourite pastime with a certain section of our countrymen and Englishmen indulged to the full the national penchant for self-depreciation. Trafficking in opium was stigmatized as an ''immoral trade.""
The helpless and innocent Chinese were said to have ''opium forced upon them."' It was "'a blot on Britain's escutcheon"' and a great deal of talk to the same purpose The... Chinese press, naturally, took us at our own valuation and even went one better than our own mentors, The trade in opium was said yo be a nefarious scheme to keep China. poor and to rob her people of their national stamina so that they would never be able to take the place in the community of nations that was theirs by right -—and so on ad nauseam. In May, 1906, the Parliament of Great Britain passed a resolution stigmatizing the opium traffic as being "'morally indefensible' and in September of the same year the Court in Peking issued an edict ordering the abolition of opium-smoking within ten years. In 1909 the International Opin Commission met in Shanghai and decided to give all needed assist-
In 1911 an agreement was come to between the Governments of China and Great Britain whereby the importation of opium into any of the provinces of China which could prove that they were themselves clean from the planting of the poppy was forbidden. By the end of March, 1917, China declared that opium was no longer grown within her borders and the importation of Indian opium ceased. Reformers the world over held this to be, as indeed it was, a great moral achievement and for a brief period China was in the limelight and her action compared to that of America in freeing the slaves or of Russia in in abolishing the sale of vodka. Enthusiasts asked whether it were not possible that the most ancient of the nations was about set a new standard of national morality.
But, alas! how soon are the mighty fallen? It is easy to glow with high enthusiasm for a brief moment, but it is hard to have the two o'clock courage that sticks to its purpose when the enthusiasm has all ebbed away. The Chinese describe themselves as ''five minutes enthusiasts.''
They can make good resolutions but have not the tenacity to see them through. They are not unlike the rest of the world in this respect, Russia abolished vodka, but the Russian peasant may bemuse himself to his heart's content to-day and nobody will say him nay. America freed her slaves but though she acknowledges the negro to be a man she will not call him a brother. We went into the war to end war; to replace secret treaties by fair and open contracts; to make Britain a land for heroes to dwell in and to do a dozen other equally impossible things which it irks us too much even to write of. And so we rise on the crest of one wave only to sink in the trough next. We are enthusiasts in our youth when we see how much may be done and pessimists in our old age when we are conscious that so little has been accomplished. Happy are we if, like Galilee, we have faith to believe in spite j of all appearances to the contrary that it' moves. We must have a like faith in China's future. {She is now passing through a period of reaction from the bound forward which she made at the time of the revolution and the recrudescence of opium smoking is only one of the symptoms of would be a thousand pities if the country were allowed to slip back into the degrading habit of opium smoking which made China a byword amongst the nations before the purge of 1917. But one thing is worthy of note. China needed a spur to stimulate her her to the exertion needed to rid the land of opium. That spur was found in the promise made by Great Britain that when China was clear of opium the importation of the drug from India should cease. Now our Government has intimated that in no circumstances will the export of opium from India to China be resumed: the spur has been removed and the planting and smoking of opium has been very generally resumed.
There is a parallel here to which we would call attention.
China is anxious that the extraterritorial rights of the treaty Powers should be rescinded. She has been promised that when her judiciary and penal systems have been reformed the treaties in which these rights are stipwated will be open to reconsideration. This is a powerful spur urging China forward: were those rights abrogated without the reforms which are now demanded as a preliminary to. the discussion, should we not see the present reform falter and fail as we have seen the movement for opium suppression fail before final and complete success has been attained?
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.