wooden drum. Ask what it means, and you will be told it is such
and such a distillery calling its hands to breakfast. Ask how many
hands they have, and you may find that one establishment has some
sixty or seventy men who eat their food! The whisky trade is simply
enormous. It is out of all proportion to every other trade. The
women as a rule do not drink, the men do all the drinking--the
males I should say, for not a few boys acquire the habit of taking
whisky to their meals long before they can be called men. A very
few men do not use whisky at all. The poorer agricultural labourers
drink it only when they can get it, and just as much or as little
as they can get. Many men take regularly two ounces--Chinese
ounces--to each meal. Many take more. Many well-to-do people drink
half a catty per day. Others drink a whole catty.[7] Some drink a
catty and a half a day. A small proportion of the male population
find drinking a greater necessity than eating. These are usually
elderly men, but as I write I can think of two men, both young, and
both Mongols, one a priest, the other a layman, who have arrived at
this advanced stage of whisky drinking.

[7] A Chinese weight equal to one pound and a third.

'This excessive use of whisky has impoverished many families, and
has demoralised many men. It has caused many quarrels, and given
rise to many lawsuits. The evil caused by whisky is apparent to
all, but custom requires that friends should be honoured by being
offered whisky, business should be transacted over whisky, and the
general saying is that without whisky nothing can be done. A
farmer, for example, adding a few rooms to his buildings must
supply his masons and joiners with whisky. Thus in universal use,
the quantity consumed is immense. The quantity of grain used in the
distilleries is almost beyond computation, and I don't remember
ever meeting a Chinaman who did not admit that to distil whisky was
to do evil. They ask me how to get good harvests. I tell them;
"Give up abusing the grain you have got, before you ask for more.
If heaven sees you taking a large part of your superior land for
raising the useless tobacco, and taking a very large proportion of
the grain sent you as food, and using it not to eat, nor to feed
animals, but distilling it into