Sidelights on Chinese Life

by J. Macgowan

Opium in China is sometimes compared to the drinking habit in England, and terrible though the latter is, men have become so accustomed to the sight of it, that it is apt to be looked upon with considerable leniency. People in the highest positions in the land have drink upon their tables, without any one commenting unfavourably, except perhaps the members of the temperance party. Clergymen, highly respectable heads of families, philanthropists, and men who are prominent in society for their benevolence, all feel that they are doing no wrong by using in moderation wines and spirits themselves, and by offering them to their friends or guests who may be visiting them. Many honestly believe that a moderate use of wine is not only allowable, but is also highly beneficial for the health, an idea that is largely believed in by the medical faculty, who are apt to recommend their patients to use it, whenever their health becomes impaired.

Now, supposing that the moderate and daily use of liquors for, say six months, would so enchain and bind a man or woman that they must, at all costs, have their daily allowance of drink that they have been accustomed to, and that if they were denied it they would be mad with pain, and so racked with agony that they could neither rest nor sleep until the awful craving had been dulled by a draught of wine or spirits, how would society look upon the use of beverages that in so brief a time would bring about so terrible a tragedy? It is quite safe to say that in a vast number of homes where to-day they are used with the utmost lightheartedness, they would be excluded with the most feverish and jealous care as enemies with whom there could be no compromise.

Let us suppose, for example, a family of six, the father and mother, two sons and two daughters. Every day, twice a day, at lunch and at dinner, one or two glasses of wine are drunk at each meal. This goes on steadily for six months, and then it is proposed that for the future there shall be no more drinking. This is agreed to; but, as the evening advances, it is found that a strange and mysterious restlessness has taken possession of the whole family. They cannot sit long, but are impelled to move about. Gnawing pains rack the bones and render life intolerable.

Retiring to rest for the night is absolutely useless, for it is found impossible to remain for more than a few minutes quiet; and besides, the mental faculties are so active and the eyes so wide awake, that sleep is the very last thing that the imagination can think of. It is soon discovered that the only thing that will restore the normal tone to both body or mind is a copious draught of wine or a bumper of brandy and soda; when, after a few minutes, the restlessness gradually vanishes, the pains and aches slowly subside from the bones and muscles of the body, and a perfect peace reigns where before mind and body were both racked in a fierce conflict with an unseen foe.

Now this is an imaginary and highly impossible picture with regard to the effects of alcohol, but it is one that is extremely applicable to the opium smoker. Let a Chinaman steadily smoke opium for six months and he can no longer call his life his own. He cannot let a single day go by without taking the amount that will relieve the tension and the strain that are put on his physical forces at a certain hour every day when the craving for the drug creeps over him. He must then have the pipe to inhale its fumes, or the agony and oppression will be so great that he will be in the greatest torture.

There is no such a thing as temperance in opium as there is in the indulgence of intoxicating liquors. Unless a man is a confirmed drunkard he can abstain for a longer or a shorter time from them without any very serious inconvenience, but such liberty is never accorded to the opium smoker. After a daily use for six months, he may never have a day off, but as the hours pass by he is reminded by the enemy that creeps over him, and that fills him with pains and languor, that he must light his pipe. Sometimes in cases of severe illness his usual dose must be doubled before his torture is relieved, and when it comes to pass that he does not wish to smoke, it is then known that a stronger than opium is going to claim him as its victim.

If a man has plenty of means he lays in a supply, and when the time comes round for him to take it, which it does with the inflexibility and cruelty of fate, he reclines on a couch and fills and refills his pipe, and draws in one volume of fume after another until the pains that have gripped every bone in his body loose their hold, and the craving that has brought a shadow over his life, and blotted out sun and moon and stars, and that has shut out of his heart his home and his wife and his children, and has given him a vision only of his own wretched self, slowly disappears, and he finally drops into a childlike sleep. He rises perfectly free from pain or weariness, but he is oppressed with the thought that twice every day he has to go through this terrible experience, and that never as long as he lives will he ever be a free man again. There is a release for every one that desires it; but the price to be paid is so great and the agony to be endured so intolerable that but very few of those upon whom opium has laid its grip would dare to attempt to free himself from its shackles.

If the opium smoker is a poor man, then indeed the lot of the home is a miserable one. At all costs he must have his pipe at the regular time, no matter who else may suffer. His wife and children may go without food, but he must be supplied. One article after another is sold to buy the opium, until the house is so bare that there is nothing left to be disposed of. Then one of the children disappears, for a childless man in another part of the city has bought it, and it now belongs to him. One after another vanishes in the same way, till no one is left except his wife. At last when all the funds have gone and there are no more little ones to dispose of, negotiations are entered into with a middle-woman, and his wife too is no longer to be found in her wretched home, for she has become the spouse of another man, and the miserable opium smoker is left alone, content with the thought that for the present, at least, he has got the funds to enable him to satisfy the craving and to keep off the horrors that would make his life one long torture.

In the middle classes where the husband is an opium smoker, and where the means are at hand to supply the daily needs of this cruel and exacting tyrant, things go on tolerably smoothly, for opium does not send men into wild and insane fits such as alcohol does, but it deadens the senses and puts them to sleep, and it tends on the whole to repress the fighting passions of a man.

The indirect influence of opium is very disastrous in its results, for it is in a large measure the producer of some of the dangerous classes that prey upon society. When a man has spent all and sold any little property that he may have possessed, he then joins the ranks of the thieves and of the gamblers, and henceforth he seems to live only for the one great purpose of grasping from any quarter that may be ready to his hand, the means of satisfying the inexorable craving that comes upon him twice every day.