pium, and to stop the traffic;
whereupon it was necessary to use British battle-ships to punish and
subdue them. Was there any difficulty in persuading the established
church of Jesus to bless this holy war? There was not! Lord
Shaftesbury, himself the most devout of Anglicans, commented with
horror upon the attitude of the clergy, and wrote in his diary:

I rejoice that this cruel and debasing opium war is
terminated. We have triumphed in one of the most lawless,
unnecessary, and unfair struggles in the records of history;
and Christians have shed more heathen blood in two years,
than the heathens have shed of Christian blood in two
centuries.

That was in 1843; for seventy years thereafter pious England continued
to force the opium traffic upon protesting China, and only in the last
two or three years has the infamy been brought to an end. Throughout
the long controversy the attitude of the church was such that Li Hung
Chang was moved to assert in a letter to the Anti-Opium Society:

Opium is a subject in the discussion of which England and
China can never meet on a common ground. China views the
whole question from a moral standpoint, England from a
fiscal.

And just as the Chinese people were poisoned with opium, so the
English people are being poisoned with alcohol. Both in town and
country, labor is sodden with it. Scientists and reformers are
clamoring for restriction;--and what prevents? Head and front of the
opposition for a century, standing like a rock, has been the
Established Church. The Rev. Dawson Burns, historian of the early
temperance movement, declares that "among its supporters I cannot
recall one Church of England minister of influence." When Asquith
brought in his bill for the restriction of the traffic in beer, he was
confronted with petitions signed by members of the clergy, protesting
against the act. And what was the basis of their protest? That beer is
a food and not a poison? Yes, of course; but also that there was
property invested in brewing it. Three hundred and thirty-two clergy
of the diocese of Peterborough declared:

We do strongly protest against the main provisions of the
present bill as creating amongst our people a sense of grave
injustice as amounting to a confiscation of private
property, spelling ruin for thousands of quite innocent
people, and provoking deep and widespread resentment, which