the growth of wealth and luxury
in the United States is not tending here, as it has tended in all
other nations, toward physical softness and deterioration. It may be
argued on the contrary that while a few Occidental children are
luxury-weakened, a great body of Oriental children are
drudgery-weakened. But is there not much more reason to fear that in
our case there is really decay at both ends of our social system--with
the pampered rich children who haven't work enough, and with the
hard-driven poor who have too much? The overworking of the very young
is certainly a serious evil in America as well as in Asia; and even in
this matter the Eastern folk are perhaps doing as well, according to
their lights, as we are. In China manufacturing is not yet extensive
enough for the problem to be serious; but in both Japan and India I
found the government councils thoroughly aroused to the importance of
conserving child-life, and grappling with different measures for the
protection of both child and women workers. My recollection is that
the four thousand brown-bodied Hindu boys (there were no girls) that I
found at work in a Madras cotton mill already have better legal
protection than is afforded the child-workers in some of our American
states.

For a long time, too, we have been accustomed to think of the Oriental
as the victim of enervating habits and more or less vicious forms of
self-indulgence. But while this may have been true in the past, the
tide is now definitely turning. Fifty years of agitation in the United
States have probably accomplished less to minimize intemperance among
us than ten years of anti-opium agitation has accomplished in ridding
China of her particular form of intemperance. I went to China too late
to see the once famous opium dens of Canton and Peking; {269} too late
to see the gorgeous poppy-fields that once lined the banks of the
Yangtze; and on the billboards in Newchang I found such notices as the
following concerning morphine, cocaine and similar drugs:

"In accordance with instructions received through the
Inspector-General from the Shuiwu Ch'u the public is hereby notified
that henceforth the importation into China of cocaine ... or
instruments for its use, except by foreign medical practitioners and
foreign druggists for medical purposes, is hereby prohibited."

And these foreign doctors handling cocaine are heavily bonded. The
Chinaman of to-day is giving up opium, is little