e rooms here and come down, from time to time,
for an orgy. That is another story for the nursery. White people do
visit the rooms, of course, but they are chiefly the white seamen of the
locality; and, in case you may ever feel tempted to visit any of the
establishments displaying the Sign of the Open Lamp, I may tell you that
your first experiment will result in violent nausea, something akin to
the effect of the cigar you smoked when you were twelve, but heightened
to the _n_th power. Opium does nasty things to the yellow man; it does
nastier things to the white man. Not only does it wreck the body, but it
engenders and inflames those curious vices to which allusion has been
made elsewhere. If you do not believe me, then you may accept the wisdom
of an unknown Formosan, who, three hundred years ago, published a tract,
telling of the effects of the Open Lamp on the white man. They are, in a
word, parallel with the effects of whisky on the Asiatic. Listen:--

The opium is boiled in a copper pan. The pipe is in appearance like
a short club. Depraved young men, without any fixed occupation,
meet together by night and smoke; and it soon becomes a habit.
Fruit and sweetmeats are provided for the sailors, and no charge
is made for the first time, in order to tempt them. After a while
they cannot stay away, and will forfeit all their property so as to
buy the drug. Soon they find themselves beyond cure. If they omit
smoking for a day, their faces become shrivelled, their lips stand
open, and they seem ready to die. Another smoke restores vitality,
but in three years they all die.

So now you know. The philanthropic foreigner published his warning in
1622. In 1915 ... well, walk down Pennyfields and exercise your nose,
and calculate how much opium is being smoked in London to-day.

Nobody troubles very much about Chinatown, except the authorities, and
their interference is but perfunctory. The yellow men, after all, are,
as Prologue to "Pagliacci" observes, but men like you, for joy or
sorrow, the same broad heaven above them, the same wide world before
them. They are but men like you, though the sanitary officials may doubt
it. They _will_ sleep six and seven in one dirty bed, and no law of
London can change their ways. Anyway, they are peaceful, agreeable
people, who ask nothing but to be allowed to go about their business and
to be happy in their own way. They are shy