pleasures are so seductive that the habit of taking it, once established,
can never be forgone, so that the moderate smoker glides almost
imperceptibly, but no less certainly, into the excessive smoker: that this
immoderate indulgence impoverishes the fortunes, mars the morality, and
ruins the health of the victim himself, and plants the seeds of disease
and vice in his children. This count in the indictment will not be quite
complete unless we add, on the authority of the missionaries, that
opium-smoking is all but universal, and the annual mortality due to it one
million at least. As to the latter estimate, we may say with the late Dr.
Medhurst, himself a zealous and enlightened medical missionary, that it
"has not even the semblance of truth, but is an outrageous exaggeration."
What the exact number of deaths from this cause may be is by no means so
easy to discover;[68] for, apart from the fact that there is no register
of deaths to appeal to, it would be impossible to decide how many even of
the deaths caused by opium could be attributed to the habit of smoking
opium as a luxury, for many of them, as has been pointed out, might be due
to suicide,[69] for self-destruction by opium[70] seems as common a
practice with the Chinese as suicide by drowning is with us. But there is
another and more fertile element of error; for many, and probably the vast
majority of cases so pathetically described by missionaries, of
victims[71] to the vice in hospitals and dying by the roadside, are cases
of men afflicted with some painful or incurable disorder who have taken to
opium-smoking, as De Quincey did to opium-eating, as a relief and a
solace. To such, indeed, it is a priceless boon, and it may well be
doubted whether it is not oftener the means of prolonging life than of
shortening it.[72] Much has been made of the evidence of T. T. Cooper
before the Parliamentary Commission in 1871, where he says that he
frequently saw men dying by the roadside, _simply from want of opium_. Yet
it is difficult to see how he ascertained the cause of death in each case.
He seems rather to have jumped at a conclusion, as he certainly did in
another part of his evidence, where he gravely affirms that, in his
opinion, were the opium supply to be suddenly cut off, _one-third_ of the
adult population of China would die! Why, to begin with, one-third of the
adult population do not even now, after the lapse of ten years, in which
the spread of the habit