Sept. 26, In view of the facts, Dr. C. C. Wu's reiteration of the plea be fore the League of Nations—tha! China still encounters great difficulties in her fight against his country regarded the Geneva Convention on the traffic in noxious drugs as in some respects a retrograde step. It is still too early for them to have forgotten China's refusal of facilities to the League' investigators when they visited the Far East. That very refusal was partly responsible for the Publication of a flood of facts upon the real situation with regard to opium in this country.
'The enormous traffic upon the Yangtze and the suspicions of official connivance in it, supper' ed by the apparently official taxation levied upon it in transit, were as well-known in Europe as they had been for years out here. Dr. Wu's com-Plaint against the foreigmconcessions as one of the sources of China's trouble must have bee? taken for what it was worth—that is, practically nothing. statistics can be produced to show that the foreign concessions are hot-beds of smuggling, this is imply because res to. Prevent that smuggling are effectively taken. No statistics, save those compiled from devious sources by hard-working members of anti-opium organizations, are available of the growth and trade elsewhere in the drug which has enveloped China like a poisonous fungus, Nearly every mail, however, brings stories from upcountry of precious agricultural lots given over to the drug, while hundreds of thousands of people in other districts are starving.
On another page to-day the report of the rottenness of the Shansi armies due to opium is published. There are no foreign concessions in Shansi, nor in the other places where most of the drug is grown. But it would be almost as wearisome as Dr. Wu's plea to recount the wealth of evidence which proves that.
untrue. The delegate's subsequent motion was much more to the point. He suggested that all State members should make a thorough-going investigation of the extent of the production and consumption of noxious drugs in their respective territories. If this were conscientiously done in China, it might be found that the smuggle ing of which the foreign concessions may be guilty is but a /drop in the ocean in comparison with what is going on in other parts of the country. It also might be possible to devise so scheme by means of which the evil could be eradicated,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.