d crime brought about a strong
expression of native feeling against the practice. "To put away the
accursed thing entirely was the only advice that appeared to the native
elders of any value at all."[45] The Government, as a recent writer in the
_Times_[46] says, promptly took advantage of this feeling to close forty
out of the sixty-eight opium shops, and raise the price of opium 30 per
cent., at a loss to the provincial revenues of from. L50,000 to L70,000.
No one will question the wisdom of these measures; but there can be little
doubt that on the one hand the demoralization caused by the spread of the
vice was exaggerated,[47] while on the other the guilt of the Government
is not so flagrantly evident, for there never were more than sixty-eight
shops in 87,000 square miles of country. No one could lawfully possess
more than one ounce of opium outside a licensed shop, and the law, if
broken, was promptly vindicated. "The Government sales, when highest,
were only enough to satisfy 3 per cent. of the adult male population."[48]

We are tempted to ask what was the cause of this sudden increase in the
consumption of opium. Increased facilities for its purchase was
undoubtedly one cause, but Sir Charles Aitchison supplies us with another
important one. "The people,"[49] he says, "are becoming emancipated from
many restrictions of their old creed. The inevitable tendency of the
education we give, and of the new sense of personal liberty which our
Government creates among an Oriental people, is to weaken the sanctions of
religious belief, and break down the restraints of social customs."[50] So
far, and this is all that a perusal of anti-opium publications will tell
us, the contention that opium is wholly pernicious seems fully borne out.
But, as before pointed out, a proof of the injuriousness of opium-_eating_
is no proof that opium-smoking is injurious; and the zealous denouncers of
the drug have omitted to mention all in the Report which tells strongly
against their own case. At the very beginning of the memorandum the
Commissioner says: "The Chinese population in British Burmah, and to some
extent also the immigrants from India, especially Chittagonians and
Bengalese, habitually consume opium without any apparent ill-effects;
those of them who have acquired the habit do not regularly indulge to
excess. With the Burmese and other indigenous races the case is different.
The Burmese seem quite incapable of using the drug in