OPIUM
There was one marked difference in the cities of China as we saw them
in our two visits, and this was the change that had taken place in the
matter of opium-smoking. Opium-smoking in 1907 was such a common vice
that you could see men smoking it at the doors of their houses. In
1909 opium-smoking hid itself, and those that smoked, smoked secretly,
or at any rate less ostentatiously. I doubt whether so great an
alteration has taken place in any country, certainly not of late years.
Each race has its peculiar vice; in fact, we may go further than that,
we may say that it is a remarkable fact that the great bulk of mankind
insists on taking some form of poison; in fact, it is only a minute
minority which wholly abstains from this practice. The poisons used by
mankind have different effects and have a different degree of toxic
power, but the reason they are used is because in some way they
stimulate or soothe the nervous system. Opium, alcohol, tobacco, tea,
coffee, hashish, are examples of this widespread habit of humanity; but
these different drugs have the most different effects on the welfare of
man. Some seem to be wholly {108} innocuous if not beneficial, and
others seem to be absolutely pernicious and to do nothing but evil; and
further than that, one may say that a different preparation of the same
drug or a different way of taking it produces differing results. A
still more curious thing is that though all mankind is agreed in taking
some poison, there is a marked, racial tendency to accept one
particular poison and to detest others, and at times it seems as if the
habit of taking one was sufficient to prevent another having any
attraction.
As we went to China we passed through the Suez Canal, and heard what a
curse hashish was in Egypt, and how the Egyptian Government had
endeavoured to secure total prohibition of the use of this obnoxious
drug, a course which was impossible owing to the great amount of
smuggling that was facilitated by the wide deserts that surround Egypt.
When we arrived at Saigon (we were travelling by the French mail) we
first came in contact with the terrible vice of the Chinese. A French
lady was pointed out to us by a doctor, and he asked us to observe the
odd glassy look of her eyes, the intense suavity of her manner and the
contempt which she evinced for truth, and he told us that these were
all symptoms of the vice of opium-smoking that she had contracted from
association with the Annamites. The French for some mysterious reason
seem more prone to acquire this vice than do our own countrymen, for
though in 1907 it was rife in South China, {109} no one ever suggested
that any English smoked opium at Hong-Kong.
As we went up to Canton crowds of people were smoking opium on the
Chinese deck, and when we wandered round they had no objection to our
standing watching the lazy process of dipping the needle into the
treacle-like mixture, turning it round till a bead was formed, then
putting it into the lamp to light and thence transferring it to the
opium pipe, when after three whiffs or so the process had to be begun
again.
The first effect of opium-smoking is to make a man intelligent and
amiable. It is for this reason that opium-smoking--so the Chinese
explained to us--is used largely in business. When business is
difficult, and you cannot get three or four men to agree, the opium
pipe is brought out, and after two or three whiffs the cantankerous
people are reasonable, and the people whose dignity is hurt are
forgiving, and business is easily and rapidly transacted. The next
stage of smoking is stupidity. As you watch an opium-smoker in that
condition he nods amiably at you with a rather imbecile look. The last
stage is one of heavy senseless sleep. The habitual opium-smoker
rarely passes the first stage, and its apparently beneficial influence
constitutes its danger. Each man says to himself: "I will never take
it to excess; I will merely use it and not abuse it; it makes life
sweet to me and business easy."
I have always thought that those who condemn {110} opium have a
tendency to prove too much in their argument. If it could be shown
that the effects of opium-taking were invariably pernicious, it would
be very hard to see how the vice could take such a hold as it has taken
on the Chinese race; if the young men regularly saw that the older men
were brought to inanity and death by the use of opium, they would
themselves be terrified of contracting the vice, and it would not have
spread as rapidly as it has done. The vice is essentially modern.
Opium has only been grown in China for about seventy or eighty years,
and it has only been imported in large quantities for a scarcely longer
period of time. An inhabitant of Shansi told us that though every one
smoked opium, and it was a terrible curse, his father remembered its
introduction. Opium is certainly deleterious to the moral fibre of a
race, and in many cases it produces death and misery; but there are a
certain number of cases where no obvious evil effects follow from its
consumption--cases when as a rule a man is well-nourished, for it acts
most deleteriously on a man's powers of digestion. Men who have good
food can better tolerate the effects of the drug, so a mission doctor
explained, and their comparative immunity tempts others to follow their
example. Men do not see at once the evil that will result, and so its
use has spread by leaps and bounds. The Chinese Government have always
theoretically resisted it, but their action has been hampered by their
not being permitted to {111} prohibit its importation. For many years
the pro-opium party in China used those treaty obligations by which
China was bound to permit the importation of opium as a reason for
stopping any efforts to extirpate the vice in the country. Not only
were there always a great number of people in high places addicted to
the vice, who were naturally unwilling to remove from themselves the
opportunity of its gratification, but also there was a vast number of
people who rapidly acquired a great pecuniary interest both in the
maintenance and extension of this trade.
Unfortunately for humanity, opium was not only very injurious but
extremely portable, and it therefore formed in a country where means of
communication are bad a very useful article of exchange. The peasant
farmer will grow most things on his little farm which he and his family
consume--in most respects they will be a self-supporting community--but
there must be a certain number of things which they will need to buy,
and for which they must give something in exchange; that something must
be portable. In many cases the only way of bringing your goods to the
market is by carrying them on your own back. Opium, alas, forms, in
soils which it suits, a most remunerative crop. The whole product of
several fields can be carried quite easily on a man's back and can be
sent down to the market, where it will find a ready sale, and the
result of that sale will be invested in articles of which the farmer
and his family have need.
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Not only the farmer, but the trader, both Chinese and European, find it
a most profitable source of trade. It was hard, and it is hard, to
persuade the European trader that it is injurious to China, and to
understand the reason we must turn back to the thought which was
suggested at the beginning of the chapter, namely, that it is very
doubtful whether the English race has any natural desire for the vice,
while it is most patent that the Chinese have a peculiar national
tendency towards this form of dissipation. When people have no desire
for an intoxicant themselves, it is hard to persuade them that others
may have a desire which may be beyond all power of restraint. The
trading class mixes but little socially with the Chinese, and the
people with whom they are brought in contact are very generally
pecuniarily interested in the opium trade, and therefore they have
neither the evidence of the Chinese nor of their own temptation to
convince them of the insidious and dangerous character of this vice to
the Chinese race.
The English race has long been conversant with opium. In the form of
laudanum it used to be sold freely in the eastern counties. I have
heard people describe years ago how the old women from the fen round
Lowestoffe, or the marshes as they are there called, would call on
market day at the chemist for their regular supply of laudanum, which
they would take in quantities sufficient to make any ordinary person go
fast asleep. It was used there, as it is used in many {113} countries,
as a prophylactic against ague. The doctors now deny that it has any
beneficial effect, but the people in the eastern counties used to think
differently. But when I was a curate at Yarmouth I could find no
traces of this vice; it had apparently been exterminated not by any
social reform or moral movement, but by the superior attraction of
alcohol; and in my day Yarmouth and the district round was terribly
addicted to the national vice of intemperance. I noticed the same
thing in Shanghai. The English know opium; most of them have out of
curiosity tried a pipe; and they describe the effects as trifling or
very unpleasant. One man said that he felt as if all his bones were a
jelly; another that he felt as if he was floating between heaven and
earth; a third that he found no pleasure in it at all, but that he had
a "filthy headache" next day. On the other hand, if you go into the
Shanghai Club you can see at once what is the attractive vice to the
European at Shanghai; the whole of one side of the entrance hall was
nothing more than the bar of an overgrown public-house. You will hear
story after story which tells the same old tale that alcohol,
especially in its strongest form, is the greatest pleasure and the
worst danger to the Englishman abroad as at home.
If opium is unattractive to the white man, on the other hand alcohol is
equally unattractive to the yellow man; in fact, their relative
position is much the same. The yellow man has known of alcohol from
the very earliest ages. Dr. Ross quotes the {114} second ode of the
Book of Poetry as showing how well known drunkenness was to the
Chinese: "Before they drank too much, they were dignified and grave;
but with too much drink their dignity changed to indecency, their
gravity to rudeness; the fact is, that when they have become drunk they
lose all sense of order. When the guests have drunk too much, they
shout, they brawl, they upset the orderly arrangement of the dishes,
they dance about unsteadily, their caps are set awry and threaten to
fall off, they dance about and do not know when to stop. Had they gone
out before drinking so deeply, both host and guest would have been
happier. Drinking gives real happiness only when it is taken in
moderation according to propriety."
Drunkenness seems to have been extirpated from China by the same
process that laudanum-taking was from the eastern counties, namely, it
has given way before the more entrancing vice of opium-smoking. I was
assured that the Tibetans do not share with the Chinese this preference
for opium, and this is all the more remarkable because from their
geographical position they have always been in close contact with
India, which is apparently the home of the opium vice, but they have
adhered steadily to the vice of drunkenness. The Chinese have free
trade in drink; they have no licensing laws; any one may sell alcohol
at any time of the day, in any place they like; and yet alcohol has so
few votaries that you will scarcely see a drunken man from one end of
China to another.
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If the English commercial world is incredulous to the danger of opium
to the Chinaman, not so the Chinese world. People will tell you that
Orientals love to agree with you in whatever you say, but I heard a
British Vice-consul flatly contradicted by a Chinese official when the
Vice-consul expressed a doubt as to the danger of the vice, and I must
say the Chinese disputant supported his contradiction with an argument
which seemed to me perfectly unanswerable. He said: "Look at the
Japanese; they are impartial spectators of the vice of alcoholism and
opium-smoking; they are conversant with the worst forms of alcoholism
that white men can show them. It is well known that white sailors are
great offenders in this respect. Every port in Japan knows what it is
to see a drunken sailor finding his way to his ship. They are equally
conversant with the vice of opium-smoking. They have intimate contact
with the Chinese; they know both the recent origin of this vice and its
terrible ravages; and what do they do? Do they forbid both vices
equally? No; they are so convinced that opium is so much more
dangerous than alcohol, that they will not allow it to be introduced
into their country for smoking purposes, and the smuggler is liable to
five years' penal servitude. But the vice of alcoholism they treat as
something which, though harmful, can never threaten their national
existence."
Perhaps we who have suffered much more from the vice of alcoholism than
of opium-smoking may be {116} inclined to think that while the Japanese
are right in the opium question, they are acting imprudently in
allowing alcoholism to gain such a hold on their people; but whether
they are right or wrong, there can be no doubt that the Chinese
official had justice on his side when he pointed out that to the
Japanese mind the evils that opium-smoking had done to China were of a
most serious character.
His Excellency Tang-K'ai-Sun spoke the Chinese mind when, in an
eloquent speech at the Shanghai Conference, he told of the awful
desolation that opium was bringing to his land. But it is unnecessary
to quote the opinion of individual Chinamen; they are practically
unanimous on this subject. One has only got to point to what China has
done to show two things. First, that the curse of opium-smoking was
far greater and more horrible than anything that we have experienced on
this side of the globe; next, that there is latent in the Chinese
character a vigour and an energy which, when it is called into action,
despises all obstacles and acts so efficiently as to leave the world
lost in astonishment. Realise what China has done. China is addicted
to a vice which has a far greater hold upon her than alcoholism has
upon us; she determines that within ten years that vice is to cease.
The production of the poppy is to be diminished till none is produced;
opium-smokers are to be held up to public scorn; opium dens--which are
really the equivalent of our public-houses--are to be closed; all
officials who take {117} opium are to be turned out of Government
employ; the only exception that is made is for old men, and that
exception was quite unavoidable. So vigorous was the action of the
Government that men who have for forty or fifty years of their lives
taken opium, tried to give it up; the result was in several cases that
they were unable to support the physical strain; a great illness, even
death, ensued; and so the edict was relaxed; men over sixty were
allowed to continue smoking. When all this was published, every one
smiled. They argued that China was trying to do the impossible. A
vice like opium-smoking may be extirpated, but only after years of
struggle. A generation must come and a generation must go before opium
or any similar vice shows appreciable diminution.
We ourselves have not been unsuccessful in struggling against the vice
of alcoholism; but consider the number of years since Father Mathew
first spoke against drink. England may be growing sober, but it is by
slow if steady degrees. But China hopes to accomplish in ten years
what has taken England so many patient years of toil to effect
partially. The idea that China could do this was regarded by most
Westerns as almost laughable. In 1907, when the edict was first put
forth, all those we met in China held this view; even missionaries,
while they gave every credit to the Government for what it intended,
shook their heads and foretold disappointment. We noticed as we passed
along that {118} wonderful line that links Hankow to Peking and Peking
to Harbin in 1907 that the country was beautiful with the white and
pink crops of poppy, till at times one might imagine that the
transformation scene of a London theatre was before us rather than the
land of China, and remembering what we had been told, we also
confidently expected failure to the edict which requires the
destruction of so many miles of this pernicious if beautiful crop.
In 1909, when we again traversed the same country, we could not see a
single poppy flower; not only so, but we made every effort to see if we
could find a field. We went for a twenty mile walk at Ichang through
the country, where no one could have expected a foreigner to come, and
we only found one tiny patch of poppy, and one in which the ruthless
hand of the law had rooted up the growing crop. As we went up the
Gorges of the Yangtsze we scanned with a strong glass the hillside, and
never once on those glorious mountains did we see any sign of opium
cultivation. We asked about the officials; not only was the Government
enforcing the law that officials must give up opium-smoking, but they
were taking a more effectual action; they were requiring all those who
were going to be officials to spend some time under supervision, to
ensure that they should not be opium-smokers. Could any Western power
hope to accomplish such a feat? Would the most extreme temperance
reformer suggest that all public-houses should be closed, that the
amount of barley {119} should be diminished every year till within ten
years none should be grown, and that all the Government officials, from
the Prime Minister downwards, should become total abstainers within
that period? The reason of this vigorous action of China and its
present success is to be attributed to two things: first, to the
terrible and very real national fear that this vice will destroy the
nation, as it has destroyed countless families and individuals;
secondly, to the vast store of energy which enables China to accept new
ideas and act vigorously on them.
The great revolution of thought that is going on has called forth this
vigour. The China of yesterday was _fainéant_ and unprogressive. The
China that is emerging out of this revolution of thought is energetic,
though possibly unpractical. The old traditions of Government are not
lost, and they wait but for the man and the hour to enable China to act
as vigorously as she has done in time past. Her action in this opium
question may be ill-considered in some details; it may even fail; but
it has shown the world that China is in earnest, and that she can act
with a vigour which will cause wonder and envy on this side of the
world. Every missionary reports that even high officials are coming
asking to be cured of the opium habit. The missionaries have founded
refuges where they receive and cure those who are ready to submit to
the terrible ordeal, for their suffering is intense. Many quack cures
are advertised. Some are definitely pernicious; for instance, the
{120} morphia syringe has become a common article for sale in some
parts of China. Some few may be beneficial. There is no doubt that
the movement against opium is a great national movement, and is not the
result of the action of any small or fanatical party. What China has
done proves that this is so.
Let me close the chapter by a quotation from the ablest of the foreign
representatives at Peking, Sir John Jordan. Writing to Sir Edward
Grey, he says: "It is true that the Chinese Government have in recent
years effected some far-reaching changes, of which the abolition of the
old examination system is perhaps the most striking instance; but to
sweep away in a decade habits which have been the growth of at least a
century, and which have gained a firm hold upon 8,000,000 of the adult
population of the empire, is a task which has, I imagine, been rarely
attempted with success in the course of history; and the attempt, it
must be remembered, is to be made at a time when the Central Government
has largely lost the power to impose its will upon the provinces. The
authors of the movement are, however, confident of success, and China
will deserve and doubtless receive much sympathy in any serious effort
she may make to stamp out the evil."
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