CHAPTER IX
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 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, 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 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 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.
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 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 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.
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 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 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 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 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 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."