He had done it all for the best. A moneyed foreigner was passing through his town near sundown without stopping to spend a single cash there. Was it not his duty, as a public-spirited man, to interfere and avert this loss, and compel the stranger to spend at least one night within his gates?
This was what I wrote at the time. I subsequently found that I had been sent for to come back because the road was believed to be dangerous, there was no secure resting-place, and the authorities could not guarantee my safety. Imagine a Chinese in a Western country acting with the bluster that I did, although in good humour; I wonder whether he would be treated with the courtesy that those Chinamen showed to me!
On the 25th an elderly chairen was ready to accompany us in the morning, and he remained with us all day. All day he was engrossed in deep thought. He spoke to no one, but he kept a watchful eye over his charge, never leaving me a moment, but dogging my very footsteps all the hundred li we travelled together. Poorly clad, he was better provided than his brother of yesterday in that he wore sandals, whereas the chairen of yesterday was in rags and barefoot. He was, of course, unprovided with weapon of any kind—it was moral force that he relied on. Over his shoulder was slung a bag from which projected his opium-pipe; a tobacco pipe and tobacco box hung at his girdle; a green glass bottle of crude opium he carried round his neck.
The chairen is the policeman of China, the lictor of the magistrate, the satellite of the official; the soldier is the representative of military authority. Now, China, in the person of her greatest statesman, Li Hung Chang, has, through the secretary of the Anti-Opium Society, called upon England "to aid her in the efforts she is now making to suppress opium." If, then, China is sincere in her alleged efforts to abolish opium, it is the chairen and the soldier who must be employed by the authorities to suppress the evil; yet I have never been accompanied by either a chairen or a soldier who did not smoke opium, nor have I to my knowledge ever met a chairen or a soldier who was not an opium-smoker. Through all districts of Yunnan, wherever the soil permits it, the poppy is grown for miles, as far as the sight can reach, on every available acre, on both sides of the road.
But why does China grow this poppy? Have not the literati and elders of Canton written to support the schemes of the Anti-Opium Society in these thrilling words: "If Englishmen wish to know the sentiments of China, here they are:—If we are told to let things go on as they are going, then there is no remedy and no salvation for China. Oh! it makes the blood run cold, and we want in this our extremity to ask the question of High Heaven, what unknown crimes or atrocity have the Chinese people committed beyond all others that they are doomed to suffer thus?" (Cited by Mr. S. S. Mander, China's Millions, iv., 156.)
And the women of Canton, have they not written to the missionaries "that there is no tear that they shed that is not red with blood because of this opium?" ("China," by M. Reed, p. 63). Why, then, does China, while she protests against the importation of a drug which a Governor of Canton, himself an opium-smoker, described as a "vile excrementitious substance" ("Barrow's Travels," p. 153), sanction, if not foster, with all the weight of the authorities in the ever-extending opium-districts the growth of the poppy? To the Rev. G. Piercy (formerly of the W.M.S., Canton), we are indebted for the following explanation of this anomaly: China, it appears, is growing opium in order to put a stop to opium-smoking.
"Moreover, China has not done with the evils of opium, even if our hands were washed of this traffic to-day. China in her desperation has invoked Satan to cast out Satan. She now grows her own opium, vainly dreaming that, if the Indian supply lapse, she can then deal with this rapidly growing evil. But Satan is not divided against himself; he means his kingdom to stand. Opium-growing will not destroy opium-smoking." (Missionary Conference of 1888, Records, ii., 546.)
"Yet the awful guilt remains," said the Ven. Archdeacon Farrar on a recent occasion in Westminster Abbey, "that we, 'wherever winds blow and waters roll,' have girdled the world with a zone of drunkenness, until I seem to shudder as I think of the curses, not loud but deep, muttered against our name by races which our fire-water has decimated and our vice degraded." (National Righteousness, December 1892, p. 4.)
And this patriotic utterance of a distinguished Englishman the Chinese will quote in unexpected support of the memorial "On the Restriction of Christianity" addressed to the Throne of China in 1884 by the High Commissioner Pêng Yü-lin, which memorial stated in severe language that "since the treaties have permitted foreigners from the West to spread their doctrines, the morals of the people have been greatly injured." ("The Causes of the Anti-Foreign Disturbances in China." Rev. Gilbert Reid, M.A., p. 9.)
Forty li from our sleeping place we came to the pretty town of Shachiaokai, on some undulating high ground well sheltered with trees. Justice had lately been here with her headsman and brought death to a gang of malefactors. Their heads, swinging in wooden cages, hung from the tower near the gateway. They could be seen by all persons passing along the road, and, with due consideration for the feelings of the bereaved relatives, they were hung near enough for the features to be recognised by their friends. Each head was in a cage of its own, and was suspended by the pigtail to the rim, so that it might not lie upside down but could by-and-by rattle in its box as dead men's bones should do. To each cage a white ticket was attached giving the name of the criminal and his confession of the offence for which he was executed. They were the heads of highway robbers who had murdered two travellers on the road near Chennan-chow, and it was this circumstance which accounted for the solicitude of the officials near Luho to prevent our being benighted in a district where such things were possible.