Twenty-five years ago, when the consumption of opium in China could hardly have been more than half what it is to-day, a British consul estimated the proportion of smokers in the region he had visited as follows: "Labourers and small farmers, ten per cent.; small shopkeepers, twenty per cent.; soldiers, thirty per cent.; merchants, eighty per cent.; officials and their staff, ninety per cent.; actors, prostitutes, vagrants, thieves, ninety-five per cent." The labourers and farmers, the real strength of China, as of every other land, had not yet been overwhelmed--but they were going under, even then. The most startling news to-day is from these lower classes, even from the country villages, the last to give way. Dr. Parker, the American Methodist missionary at Shanghai, informed me that reports to this effect were coming in steadily from up country; and during my own journey I heard the same bad news almost everywhere along a route which measured, before I left China, something more than four thousand miles.
Perhaps the most convincing summing up of China's predicament is found in another translation from a recent Chinese document, this time an appeal to the throne from four viceroys. The quaintness of the language does not, I think, impair its effectiveness and its power as a protest: "China can never become strong and stand shoulder and shoulder with the powers of the world unless she can get rid of the habit of opium-smoking by her subjects, about one quarter of whom have been reduced to skeletons and look half-dead."
This then is the curse which the imperial government has talked so quaintly of "abandoning." This is the debauchery which is to be put down by officials, ninety per cent of whom were supposed to be more or less confirmed smokers. Such almost childlike optimism brings to mind a certain Sunday in New York City when Theodore Roosevelt, with the whole police force under his orders, tried to close the saloons. It brings to mind other attempts in Europe and America, to check and control vice and depravity--attempts which have never, I think, been wholly successful--and one begins to understand the discouraging immensity of the task which China has undertaken. Really, to "stop using opium" would mean a very rearranging of the agricultural plan of the empire. It would make necessary an immediate solution of China's transportation problem (no other crop is so easy to carry as opium) and an almost complete reconstruction of the imperial finances; indeed, few observers are so glib as to suggest offhand a substitute for the immense opium revenue to the Chinese government. And nobody to accomplish all this but those sodden officials, of whom it is safe to guess that fifty per cent have some sort or other of a financial stake in the traffic!