has been unchecked, smoke opium; no, nor any
number approaching it. Secondly, it has been proved in the case of
prisoners, whose supply of opium is always stopped when they enter the
jail,[73] that a sudden deprivation of the drug does not cause death.
Again, opium is held accountable for pauperism, dishonesty, crime, and
depravity of all sorts. That indulgence of any kind is a sign of moral
weakness, and likely further to deprave the moral nature, is undeniable,
but (and here we have Dr. Myers with us) "though excessive opium may
hasten the effects of a general moral depravity, we are inclined to think
that it is much more often rather a sequence than a cause." "In China,"
says Mr. Lay, "the spendthrift, the man of lewd habits, the drunkard, and
a large assortment of bad characters slide into the opium-smoker: hence
the drug seems chargeable with all the vices of the country." There will
be no need to point out that opium is not the cause of all the pauperism
and vice that exists among the Chinese people; for a vast amount of
pauperism is common to all Eastern races, and dishonesty, untruthfulness,
cruelty, and vice of the most revolting kind, were characteristic of the
Chinese long before opium was so common as it now is.

What, then, are the effects of opium-smoking on the Chinese individually
and as a nation? Had they been anything like what the anti-opiumists
assert they must be, surely the effect would be visible after all these
years in an increased death-rate or a decreased birth-rate. Needless to
say, no such aggregate result is observable. Where opium is most smoked,
there the population is most thriving and industrious,[74] and increases
the fastest. "No China resident," says Dr. Ayres, colonial surgeon at
Hongkong, "believes in the terrible frequency of the dull, sodden-witted,
debilitated opium-smoker, met with in print." Mr. Gregory, H.M.'s Consul
at Swatow, says: "I have _never_ seen a single case of opium intoxication,
although living with and travelling for months and hundreds of miles with
opium-smokers."[75] Dr. Myers, after ten years' medical practice in
different parts of China, confesses that his "preconceived prejudices with
reference to the universally baneful effects of the drug had been severely
shaken." Again, it was estimated by the colonial surgeon at Hongkong, in
1855, that there were more deaths from drunkenness in Hongkong among the
600 Europeans than from opium among the 60,000 Chinamen. S