June 12, It is a great pity, but nevertheless true, that it is impossible to be impressed either by the latest Sovernment pronouncements on the subject of opium, or the suggestions "which have been put forward by the National Anti-opium Association to the Central authori-les. "That is because they are Generally lacking in that degree of Sincerity which would be the best indication of a real determination to handle a trafic which is increasing in its menace to the whole country, and saturating it in an abuse which must give thoughtful people much cause for anxious meditation. Thus the National Anti-Opium Association in. their Petition to the Central authorities struggle manfully with the mote in the eyes of other countries in the Pacific, allege that Japan and colonial countries are aiding and abetting the spread of opium among the Chinese for the purpose of subjugating that unhappy people, and then go on to allege that if there is a beam in the Chinese eye this matter, the size of it may be considerably ' exaggerated. After which there is the admission that opium is being planted in this country. One of the disadvantages under which the Chinese reformer this matter labours is that he cannot concentrate on his side of the question, but is more concerned with what people in other parts of the world are doing, as if China were not producing enough opium to fil all her needs and considerably over. The proposal to establish an Opium-Suppression Planning Committee, including forel and Chinese experts, sounds all very well, but it is doubtful whether foreigners will consent to take part in a proceeding which has about it all the prospects of ultimate failure. Foreign experiences in the investigation the culture of opium have not been too fortunate, and history shows that, where they have engag-in such investigation, they have been misled by the connivance of the very authorities they were doing their best to serve, as witness the foreign commission which years ago, after a tour of China, " solemnly affixed thei signatures to a report that the country was free of the poppy. They had seen none because it was destroyed before their steps and replanted after they had passed. methods. The root causes of the opium menace penetrate so deeply into what passes for the economics of this country that reform is not to be found "in the passage of severe legislation which ignores first causes, but in the complete rehabilitation of the methods by which the interior finds the money does for the maintenance of whatever government it possesses.
long as militarists, who still control vast areas of this land, have to find their wealth in the way they do, so long as the peasantry are burdened with legal and illegal taxation which they are at present paying in the most tragic circumstances, so long as no mote revenue can be raised by legitimate labour, so long will the inducement to grow opium exist. Add to this the fact that all this recognized by the very men whose exactions are ruining the country, and that some of them at least deliberately encourage the cultiva tion of the poppy for the purposes of revenue, it becomes apparent that reform can no longer ceted from the passage of pious resolutions or the enactment of Severe legislation, but only from a complete change of the whole of China's financial system. The farmer has to live. To do that he has to pay the relatively enormous sums for the privilege of being able to wrest a meagre sustenance out of the soil which repeated exactions have not yet taken from him, and the only means of doing so in the larger part of China is to grow opium, thousands of tons of it per annum, The solution to the problem thus presented is apparent. It is found in the policy of the Nanking Government which calls for rural Fehabilitation. It demands the relief of the peasantry and the larger farmers from the intolerable burdens of taxation which have been laid upon them with neither rhyme nor reason, except, perhaps, the desire to. maintain unwieldy bodies of inefficient soldiery and to wrest the last copper from the People they hold in such tragic economic subjugation. Enough has appeared in the columns of this journal from time to time to show that the resort to poppy cul tion in a large part of China has been a counsel of despair on the part of the poor people thus obliged to grow it, Tt may be argued that this contention must of necessity postpone effective dealing with this, and ead to its con-for an unconscionably long period. Unfortunately, that may be true, but every attempt to deal with the matter has been somewhat along the lines of a physician who has sought to suppress his patient's rash, without endeavouring to remove the root causes of that distressing symptom. Those attempts have been just as successful and have betrayed just as much understanding of the facts of the trouble. This is, howe cerlain—no movement to eradicate the poppy in China can have last-Ing success which does not take into consideration the lamentable condition of the agriculturist and the great temptation there is to alleviate his lot by indulgence in a practice which, {t might even be held, to endeavour to suppress in present circumstances would be unjust. Legitimate husbandry cannot pay the imposts which it 4s called upon to meet, other and more profitable crops have to be raised to fill an insatiable maw with money, and such a crop is opium. There is something to be said for the contention that by endeavouring to wipe out addiction and thus re~ moving demand, the supply would stop coincidentally, but repression has not wiped it out in the past and there is no real likelihood that it will in this present day. It is not intended to lay the present tragic state of affairs at the door of the present government. would be unfair to do so, for this opium evil is the unhappy legacy of decades of misrule. That the Central Authorities are striving to do something to mend matters {s to their credit, but the more the question is studied the more the conviction must be established that it is only by the eradication of root causes that real amendment can be effected.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.