II.OPIUM-SMOKING IN CHINA COMPAREDWITH THE DRINKING HABITS OFENGLAND.
Onthis point the evidence of Mr. (now Sir Thomas) Wade, K.C.B., Her Majesty’s minister at the Court of Peking, given in Government Blue Book, No. 5 (1871), p. 432, is so decisive, that it precludes the necessity of further testimony. He says:—
“It is to me vain to think otherwise of the use of the drug in China, than as of a habit many times more pernicious, nationally speaking, than the gin and whisky drinking which we deplore at home. It takes possession more insidiously, and keeps its hold to the full as tenaciously. I know no case of radical cure. It has insured in every case within my knowledge the steady descent, moral and physical, of the smoker, and it is so far a greater mischief than drink, that it does not, by external evidence of its effect, expose its victim to the loss of repute which is the penalty of habitual drunkenness.”