charge until his prescribed dose is exhausted,
or until his means of purchase are expended.
There are smoking-shops by hundreds in the
towns within moderate distance of the coast;
and these shops, we are told, are kept open
day and night, each being furnished with a
number of couches formed of bamboo-canes
and covered with mats and rattans; a sort of
wooden stool serves as a bolster or pillow;
and in the centre of the shop is a lamp that
serves for many smokers, each of whom is
enabled to turn the bowl of his pipe towards
it. Mr. Pohlman, an American resident at
Amoy, has stated that there are a thousand
of these opium-smoking shops in that town
alone. If the account of these shops rested
only on the testimony of missionaries, it
might be supposed that a heightened colour
was given to the effects by men who regard
the indulgence as an irreparable, uncompensated
evil; but Lord Jocelyn, who accompanied
the Chinese expedition as military
secretary seventeen years ago, and who, as a
military man, may not be suspected of
oversensitiveness on such a matter, gives testimony
that ought not to be overlooked. He is
speaking of the opium-shops of Singapore,
analogous to those of China: "In these
houses devoted to their ruin, these infatuated
people may be seen at nine o'clock in the
evening, in all the different stages. Some
entering half distracted to feed the craving
appetite they have been obliged to subdue
during the day; others laughing and talking
wildly under the effects of a first pipe; whilst
the couches round are filled with their
different occupants, who lie languid, with an
idiot smile upon their countenances—too
much under the influence of the drug to care
for passing events, and fast emerging to the
wished-for consummation. The last scene in
the tragic play is generally a room in the
rear of the building, a species of dead-house,
where lie stretched those who have passed
into the state of bliss which the opium-smoker
madly seeks, an emblem of the long
sleep to which he is blindly hurrying." Dr.
Ball, many years a resident in China, speaks
of "walking skeletons, families wretched and
beggared by drugged fathers and husbands,
and who have lost house and home, may be
seen dying in the streets, in the fields, on the
banks of the river, without even a stranger
to care for them while alive, and, when dead,
left exposed to view till they become offensive
masses." This last quotation, however, is of
insufficient value; since any husband or
father who became beggared and wretched in
China, and rendered his family beggared and
wretched, whether by spirit-drinking or by
opium-smoking, would produce almost the
same amount of evil; the question is, not as
to the wretchedness of such a state, but as to
the tendency of opium-smoking to produce
it. On this point it is impossible to avoid
noticing the concurrence of opinion that the
confirmed opium-smoker may be known "by
his inflamed eyes and haggard countenance,
by his lank and shrivelled limbs, tottering
gait, sallow visage, feeble voice, and the
death-boding glance of his eye. He seems
the most forlorn creature that treads the
earth."

Now, however much we may laugh at the
pretensions of the Emperor of China to be
brother to the sun and moon, and to be
ineffably superior in all points to the barbarians
of Europe, we may reasonably ask ourselves
whether we are to give him any credit
for sincerity in regard to the welfare of
his own subjects. The missionaries give
him much of this credit, the merchants
give him little or none; it may perhaps
be found that a medium estimate between
the two is more nearly correct than either.
It is known that, about eighteen years ago,
the Emperor and his council discussed fully
the opium-question; it was found that all
attempts to check the contraband trade with
the British, were rendered futile by the
self-interested energy of the merchants, by the
growing love of the Chinese for the drug, and
by the venality of the Emperor's officers.
Some of his ministers, seeing the impracticability
of prohibition, proposed the legalised
admission of opium into China under an
import duty, so as to render it a source of
revenue; but this was overruled, and an
increased rigour of prohibition adopted. Knowing
imperfectly, as we in England must
necessarily do, the motives that led to the
decision, we cannot say how far self-interest
prompted it; but, at any rate, the Chinese
government did not snatch at a source of
revenue from a commodity which they had
already and unequivocally condemned. The
decision once made, the government sent Lin,
an officer of high distinction and in high
command, from Pekin to Canton, as a
commissioner empowered to put down at once
and completely the opium trade at that port.
Commissioner Lin, in the month of March,
eighteen hundred and thirty-nine, startled
the opium traders by suddenly seizing a
number of British merchants at Canton, and
retaining them as prisoners until the whole
of the opium belonging to all foreigners at
that port was delivered into his hands. It
has since been frequently asserted, that if the
merchants had been left to themselves, they
would in some way have got out of the
scrape, perhaps with a partial loss; knowing
that they were abettors of smuggling, so far
as concerned opium, they would perhaps have
yielded, in order to save their trade in tea
and other commodities. But, whatever this
amount of probability may have been, the
merchants were not left to themselves. On
the ending of the East India Company's
monopoly, five years before, a superintendent
of trade in China was appointed by the
British government, and this superintendent
was perpetually embroiled with the authorities.
He was not permitted to address the