Many writers on Chinese topics delight to dwell upon the slow but sure
destruction of morals, manners, and men, which is being gradually
effected throughout the Empire by the terrible agency of opium.
Harrowing pictures are drawn of once well-to-do and happy districts
which have been reduced to know the miseries of disease and poverty by
indulgence in the fatal drug. The plague itself could not decimate so
quickly, or war leave half the desolation in its track, as we are told
is the immediate result of forgetting for a few short moments the
cares of life in the enjoyment of a pipe of opium. To such an extent
is this language used, that strangers arriving in China expect to see
nothing less than the stern reality of all the horrors they have heard
described; and they are astonished at the busy, noisy sight of a
Chinese town, the contented, peaceful look of China's villagers, and
the rich crops which are so readily yielded to her husbandmen by many
an acre of incomparable soil. Where, then, is this scourge of which
men speak? Evidently not in the highways, the haunts of commerce, or
in the quiet repose of far-off agricultural hamlets. Bent on search,
and probably determined to discover something, our seeker after truth
is finally conducted to an opium den, one of those miserable hells
upon earth common to every large city on the globe. Here he beholds
the vice in all its hideousness; the gambler, the thief, the beggar,
and such outcasts from the social circle, meet here to worship the god
who grants a short nepenthe from suffering and woe. This, then, is
China, and travellers' tales are but too true. A great nation has
fallen a prey to the insidious drug, and her utter annihilation is but
an affair of time!
We confess, however, we have looked for these signs in vain; but our
patience has been rewarded by the elucidation of facts which have led
us to brighter conclusions than those so generally accepted. We have
not judged China as a nation from the inspection of a few low
opium-shops, or from the half dozen extreme cases of which we may have
been personally cognizant, or which we may have gleaned from the
reports of medical missionaries in charge of hospitals for native
patients. We do not deny that opium is a curse, in so far as a large
number of persons would be better off without it; but comparing its
use as a stimulant with that of alcoholic liquors in the West, we are
bound to admit that the comparison is very much to the disadvantage of
the latter. Where opium kills its hundreds, gin counts its victims by
thousands; and the appalling scenes of drunkenness so common to a
European city are of the rarest occurrence in China. In a country
where the power of corporal punishments is placed by law in the hands
of the husband, wife-beating is unknown; and in a country where an
ardent spirit can be supplied to the people at a low price, _delirium
tremens_ is an untranslateable term. Who ever sees in China a tipsy
man reeling about a crowded thoroughfare, or lying with his head in a
ditch by the side of some country road? The Chinese people are
naturally sober, peaceful, and industrious; they fly from
intoxicating, quarrelsome samshoo, to the more congenial opium-pipe,
which soothes the weary brain, induces sleep, and invigorates the
tired body.
In point of fact, we have failed to find but a tithe of that real vice
which cuts short so many brilliant careers among men who, with all the
advantages of education and refinement, are euphemistically spoken of
as addicted to the habit of "lifting their little fingers." Few
Chinamen seem really to love wine, and opium, by its very price, is
beyond the reach of the blue-coated masses. In some parts, especially
in Formosa, a great quantity is smoked by the well-paid chair-coolies,
to enable them to perform the prodigies of endurance so often required
of them. Two of these fellows will carry an ordinary Chinaman, with
his box of clothes, thirty miles in from eight to ten hours on the
hottest days in summer. They travel between five and six miles an
hour, and on coming to a stage, pass without a moment's delay to the
place where food and opium are awaiting their arrival. After smoking
their allowance and snatching as much rest as the traveller will
permit, they start once more upon the road; and the occupant of the
chair cannot fail to perceive the lightness and elasticity of their
tread, as compared with the dull, tired gait of half an hour before.
They die early, of course; but we have trades in civilised England in
which a man thirty-six years of age is pointed at as a patriarch.
It is also commonly stated that a man who has once begun opium can
never leave it off. This is an entire fallacy. There is a certain
point up to which a smoker may go with impunity, and beyond which he
becomes a lost man in so far as he is unable ever to give up the
practice. Chinamen ask if an opium-smoker has the _yin_ or not;
meaning thereby, has he gradually increased his doses of opium until
he has established a _craving_ for the drug, or is he still a free man
to give it up without endangering his health. Hundreds and thousands
stop short of the _yin_; a few, leaving it far behind them in their
suicidal career, hurry on to premature old age and death. Further,
from one point of view, opium-smoking is a more self-regarding vice
than drunkenness, which entails gout and other evils upon the third
and fourth generation. Posterity can suffer little or nothing at the
hands of the opium-smoker, for to the inveterate smoker all chance of
posterity is denied. This very important result will always act as an
efficient check upon an inordinately extensive use of the drug in
China, where children are regarded as the greatest treasures life has
to give, and blessed is he that has his quiver full.
Indulgence in opium is, moreover, supposed to blunt the moral feelings
of those who indulge; and to a certain extent this is true. If your
servant smokes opium, dismiss him with as little compunction as you
would a drunken coachman; for he can no longer be trusted. His wages
being probably insufficient to supply him with his pipe and leave a
balance for family expenses, he will be driven to squeeze more than
usual, and probably to steal. But to get rid of a writer or a clerk
merely because he is a smoker, however moderate, would be much the
same as dismissing an employe for the heinous offence of drinking two
glasses of beer and a glass of sherry at his dinner-time. An
opium-smoker may be a man of exemplary habits, never even fuddled,
still less stupefied. He may take his pipe because he likes it, or
because it agrees with him; but it does not follow that he must
necessarily make himself, even for the time being, incapable of doing
business. Wine and moonlight were formerly considered indispensables
by Chinese bards; without them, no inspiration, no poetic fire. The
modern poetaster who pens a chaste ode to his mistress's eyebrow,
seeks in the opium-pipe that flow of burning thoughts which his
forefathers drained from the wine-cup. We cannot see that he does
wrong. We believe firmly that a moderate use of the drug is attended
with no dangerous results; and that moderation in all kinds of eating,
drinking, and smoking, is just as common a virtue in China as in
England or anywhere else.[*]
[*] Sir Edmund Hornley, after nine years' service as chief judge of
the Supreme Court at Shanghai, delivered an opinion on the anti-
opium movement in the following remarkable terms:--"Of all the
nonsense that is talked, there is none greater than that talked
here and in England about the immorality and impiety of the opium
trade. It is simply sickening. I have no sympathy with it, neither
have I any sympathy with the owner of a gin-palace; but as long as
China permits the growth of opium throughout the length and
breadth of the land, taxes it, and pockets a large revenue from
it,--sympathy with her on the subject is simply ludicrous and
misplaced."--(J. W. Walker v. Malcolm, 28th April 1875.)
But the following extract from a letter to the _London and China
Express_, of 5th July 1875, part of which we have ventured to
reproduce in italics, surpasses, both in fiction and naivete,
anything it has ever been our lot to read on either side of this
much-vexed question:--"The fact is, that this tremendous evil is
utterly beyond the control of politicians, or even
philanthropists. Nothing but the divine power of Christian life
can cope with it, and though this process may be slow, it is sure.
Christian missions alone can deal with the opium traffic, now that
it has attained such gigantic dimensions, and the despised
missionaries are solving a problem which to statesmen is
insoluble. Those, therefore, who recognise the evils of opium-
smoking will most effectually stay the plague _by supporting
Christian Protestant Missions in China_.--Yours faithfully,
"An Old Residenter in China.
"London, June 28, 1875."