In China they do not eat opium, they smoke it. There is an historical fact connected with them well known to all the world to which I would not now call attention were it not to show you to what extent a like calamity may go, and consequently with what the French people are threatened if the love of morphine continues to take among us the same intensity.
Hundreds of years ago opium was, in the Chinese empire, a great luxury, reserved for the mandarins, who did not keep secret at all their use of it, but who interdicted it to all persons under their jurisdiction. All the more did they consider it a great honor to their invited guests, and especially to strangers, to be asked to partake of it. Recently it has come into general use, and since 1840 its abuse has reached the last limits. There is for all this an economic reason which I shall not fear to call abominable. The Chinese received in payment for their products only gold and silver, in money or in ingots; the specie thus introduced into their country never left it, and it was a veritable drainage which on this account Europe and America underwent.
A neighboring nation of ours, and one whose Indian possessions furnish prodigious quantities of opium, forced China, in a celebrated treaty, to allow the entrance of this opium into her ports and to pay for it in ingots and not in merchandise; the empire was thus obliged to disgorge a part of its money held in reserve. You will have an idea of the importance of this operation when you know that to-day there enters annually into China 70,000 packing cases of opium from India, worth at least $558,000. So much poison forced by right of war upon a whole people!
The Chinese smoke opium from the age of twenty to twenty-five years. The immediate effect is a sort of dizzy sensation. The preoccupations of the mind disappear, as do also all ailments of the body. Then comes a noisy delirium, a kind of insanity, in which the subject is deeply agitated; he is apt to hurl down and break everything around him. Sometimes he rushes out of the house, attacks the first passer-by, and not infrequently in his frenzy has committed murder.
The opium smoker, as well as the eater, is obliged rapidly to increase the dose of his poison. At the end of six or eight months he must smoke a dozen pipes a day. His money is soon all spent; he is ruined in a year. He sells all that he possesses, and then he gambles. Writers agree in saying that the maximum of the life of a smoker is then five or six years.
In the face of such an evil as this the imperial government has tried to act on the defensive; it placed a heavy duty on the entrance of opium; but this system was not successful. And before this attempt it tried penal jurisprudence.
This is the decree which the Viceroy of Canton published in 1841:
“It is two years since the Emperor of the Celestial Empire forbade all his subjects to smoke opium. This delay of grace expires the twelfth day of the twelfth moon of this year. Then all those guilty of offense against this law will be put to death, their heads will be exposed in public, in order to frighten those who might be tempted to follow their example.” (Then follows this modification.) “I have reflected, however, that solitary confinement would be more efficacious than capital punishment, in order to arrest such a dreadful misdemeanor. I declare then, that I am going to have built a special prison for opium smokers. There they will all, rich or poor, be shut in narrow cells, lighted by one window, with two boards serving as a bed and a seat. They will be given each day a ration of oil, of rice, and of vegetables. In case of a second offense they will be put to death.”
This legislation was not practicable. The punishment was out of proportion to the crime, and consequently inapplicable.
Besides, in looking around him the emperor found that his own wives smoked opium, and I would not guarantee that if he meant to live up to the letter of his law, he would not have to begin by committing suicide.