raffic with a fervour that varies
proportionately with their ignorance. In contemplating the success of this
misdirected enthusiasm we are irresistibly reminded of a very "judicious"
remark of Hooker's, who says: "Because such as openly reprove supposed
disorders of State are taken for principal friends to the common benefit
of all, and for men that carry singular freedom of mind; under this fair
and plausible colour whatsoever they utter passeth for good and current."

For more than forty years the opium trade between India and China has been
a subject for keen discussion and hostile comment in England. Being as it
was the _immediate_ cause of our first war with China in 1840, the opium
traffic could not fail, in Parliament and elsewhere, to be brought
prominently before the notice of the people of England, and of course
there were not wanting public men to denounce the policy pursued by this
country towards China in that matter. This denunciation, at first of a
vague and desultory character, took a definite shape in the memorial
presented to Her Majesty's Government in the Earl of Shaftesbury's name,
and backed by all his great personal authority. The specific charges
contained in this document will be noticed hereafter, when we come to
sketch the present position of the "Society." Suffice it here to say that
it teemed with misstatements and exaggerations of the grossest and most
palpable kind, which, having been exposed and refuted again and again,
need not detain us now. But so far were those random statements from
furthering the cause which the memorialists had at heart, that they only
served to steel the minds of unprejudiced people against further
representations, however just, from the same quarter.

Since then, however, the agitation has taken a more organized form, and
there is now a society for the suppression of the trade, numbering its
hundreds of supporters, and linked with the names of such men as Lord
Shaftesbury, Cardinal Manning, Sir J. W. Pease, and Sir Wilfrid Lawson.
Nearly the whole of the clergy from the Archbishops downwards, and
ministers of every denomination, have declared for the same side. Add to
this that the Society has a large income, derived from voluntary
subscriptions, which is assiduously employed in the dissemination of its
peculiar doctrines. The country is flooded with tracts, pamphlets, reports
of addresses, speeches, and petitions, all inculcating the same extreme
opinions.

Un