od
business for the British Empire.

However, opium is not bad for one. There are plenty of people to
testify to that. We Americans have a curious notion to the contrary,
but then, we Americans are so hysterical and gullible. An Englishman
whom we met in Bangkok told me that opium was not only harmless, but
actually beneficial. He said once that he was traveling through the
jungle, into the interior somewhere. He had quite a train of coolies
with him, carrying himself and his baggage through the dense forests.
By nightfall, he found his coolies terribly exhausted with the long
march. But he was in a hurry to press on, so, as he expressed it, he
gave each of them a "shot" of morphia, whereupon all traces of fatigue
vanished. They forgot the pain of their weary arms and legs and were
thus enabled to walk all night. He said that morphia certainly knocked
a lot of work out of men--you might say, doubled their capacity for
endurance.

The night we left Bangkok, we got aboard the boat at about nine in the
evening. The hatch was open, and we looked into the hold upon a crowd
of coolies who had been loading sacks of rice aboard the ship. There
they lay upon the rice sacks, two or three dozen of them, all smoking
opium. Two coolies to a lamp. I rather wondered that a lamp did not
upset and set the boat on fire, but they are made of heavy glass, with
wide bottoms, so that the chances of overturning them are slight. So we
leaned over the open hatch, looking down at these little fellows,
resting and recuperating themselves after their work, refreshing
themselves for the labor of the morrow.

Opium is wonderful, come to think of it. But why, since it is so
beneficial and so profitable, confine it to the downtrodden races of
the world? Why limit it to the despised races, who have not sense
enough to govern themselves anyway?

The following figures are taken from the Statistical Year Books for the
Kingdom of Siam:

Foreign trade and navigation of the port of Bangkok, imports of opium:

1911-12 1,270 chests of opium
1912-13 1,775
1913-14 1,186
1914-15 2,000 Imported from India and Singapore.
1915-16 2,000
1916-17 1,100
1917-18 1,850

Also, from the same source, we find the number of retail opium shops:

1912-13 2,985
1913-14 3,025
1914-15 3,132
1915-16 3,104
1916-17 3,111

VII

HONGKONG

"The Crown C