hly effective at the start. The opium dens in all the
large cities were closed during the spring, and the restaurants and
disorderly houses which had formerly served opium to their customers
surrendered their lamps and implements. Throughout the other provinces
north of the Yangtse River, while there was evidence of a fairly
consistent attempt to enforce the new regulations, the results were not
altogether satisfying. Along the central and southern coast, from Shanghai
to Canton, the enforcement was effective in about half the important
centers of population. In Canton, or Kwangtung Province, the prohibition
was practically complete.

The real test of the prohibition movement is to come in the great interior
provinces of the South, Yunnan and Kweichou, and in the huge western
province of Sze-chuan. It is in these regions that opium has had its
strongest grip on the people, and where the financial and agricultural
phases of the problems are most acute. All observers recognized that it
was unfair to expect immediate and complete prohibition in these regions,
where opium-growing is quite as grave a question as opium-smoking. The
beginning of the enforcement in Sze-chuan seems to have been cautious but
sincere. In this one province the share of the imperial tax on opium
alone, over and above local needs, amounts to more than $2,000,000
(gold), and, thanks to the constant demands of the foreign powers for
their "indemnity" money, the imperial government is hardly in a position
to forego its demands on the provinces. But recognizing that a new revenue
must be built up to supplant the old, the three new opium commissioners of
Sze-chuan have begun by preparing addresses explaining the evils of opium,
and sending out "public orators" to deliver them to the people. They have
also used the local newspapers extensively for their educational work; and
they have sent out the provincial police to make lists of all
opium-smokers, post their names on the outside of their houses, and make
certain that they will be debarred from all public employment and from
posts of honour. The chief commissioner, Tso, declares that he will clear
Chen-tu, the provincial capital, a city of 400,000 inhabitants, of opium
within four years; and no one seems to doubt that he will do it as
effectively as he has cleared the streets of the beggars for which Chen-tu
was formerly notorious. When Mr. J. G. Alexander, of the British
Anti-Opium Society, was in Chen-t