The downward course of the opium-smoker is now very rapid. Exposure to the weather and want of food accelerate the injurious effects of the opium. No one would think of giving a night’s shelter to a man whose imperious craving for opium would compel him to rob his benefactor before morning. Endeavouring to warm himself in the sunshine, with unshaven head and haggard countenance, the sower coming with his seed-basket finds him in a sheltered corner of the field.
No. 12.
Winter draws on apace. The fields supply nothing that the wretched opium-smoker can eat. All he can beg is insufficient to purchase that opium without which he could not exist for a single day; he has therefore exchanged his only shirt for a little opium, to quiet for a time what an opium-smoker well called “the torments of the hell within.” All power of enjoyment has long since passed away: now there is nothing before him but suffering—suffering beyond the grave! With trembling steps and a shivering frame he seeks the shelter of a cave among the rocks, in which he will lie down and die. Nor is he alone in his misery; thousands of similar victims are living, dying, dead—they are to be found everywhere.
II.
OPIUM-SMOKING IN CHINA COMPARED
WITH THE DRINKING HABITS OF
ENGLAND.
On this point the evidence of Mr. (now Sir Thomas) Wade, K.C.B., Her Majesty’s minister at the Court of Peking, given in Government Blue Book, No. 5 (1871), p. 432, is so decisive, that it precludes the necessity of further testimony. He says:—
“It is to me vain to think otherwise of the use of the drug in China, than as of a habit many times more pernicious, nationally speaking, than the gin and whisky drinking which we deplore at home. It takes possession more insidiously, and keeps its hold to the full as tenaciously. I know no case of radical cure. It has insured in every case within my knowledge the steady descent, moral and physical, of the smoker, and it is so far a greater mischief than drink, that it does not, by external evidence of its effect, expose its victim to the loss of repute which is the penalty of habitual drunkenness.”