Part 2 (1/2)
”Your legalized opium has been a cure in every province it penetrates, and your refusal to limit or decrease the import has forced us to attempt a dangerous remedy--legalized native opium--not because we approve of it, but to compete with and drive out the foreign drug; and it is expelling it, and when we have only the native production to deal with, and thus have the business in our own hands, we hope to stop the habit in our own way.”
The great step has failed. Indian opium has not been expelled. For the Chinese to put down the native drug without stopping the import is impossible as well as useless. The Chinese seem determined, in one way or another, to put down both. Once, again, after a weary century of struggle, they have approached the British government. Once again the British government has been driven from the Scylla of healthy Anglo-Saxon moral indignation to the Charybdis behind that illuminating phrase--”India needs the money.” Twenty million dollars is a good deal of money. The balance sheet reigns; and the balance sheet is an exacting ruler, even if it has triumphed over common decency, over common morality, over common humanity.
Will you ride with me (by rickshaw) along the International Bund at Shanghai--beyond the German Club and the Hongkong Bank--over the little bridge that leads to Frenchtown--past a half mile of warehouses and chanting coolies and big yellow Hankow steamers--until we turn out on the French Bund? It is a raw, cloudy, March morning; the vendors of queer edibles who line the curbing find it warmer to keep their hands inside their quilted sleeves.
[Ill.u.s.tration: AN OPIUM RECEIVING s.h.i.+P OR ”G.o.dOWN” AT SHANGHAI The Imported Indian Opium is Stored in These s.h.i.+ps Until it Pa.s.ses the Chinese Imperial Customs]
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE OPIUM HULKS OF SHANGHAI ”They Symbolize China's Degredation”]
It is a lively day on the river. Admiral Brownson's fleet of white cruisers lie at anchor in midstream. A lead-gray British cruiser swings below them, an anachronistic Chinese gunboat lower still. Big black merchantmen fill in the view--a P. and O. s.h.i.+p is taking on coal--a two-hundred-ton junk with red sails moves by. Nearer at hand, from the stone quay outward, the river front is crowded close with sampans and junks, rows on rows of them, each with its round little house of yellow matting, each with its swarm of brown children, each with its own pungent contribution to the all-pervasive odour. Gaze out through the forests of masts, if you please, and you will see two old hulks, roofed with what looks suspiciously like s.h.i.+ngles, at anchor beyond. They might be ancient men-of-war, pensioned off to honourable decay. You can see the square outline of what once were portholes, boarded up now. The carved, wooden figure-heads at the prow of each are chipped and blackened with age and weather. What are they and why do they lie here in mid-channel, where commerce surges about them?
These are the opium hulks of Shanghai. In them is stored the opium which the government of British India has grown and manufactured for consumption in China. They symbolize China's degradation.
III
A GLIMPSE INTO AN OPIUM PROVINCE
The opium provinces of China--that is, the provinces which have been most nearly completely ruined by opium--lie well back in the interior. They cover, roughly, an area 1,200 miles long by half as wide, say about one-third the area of the United States; and they support, after a fas.h.i.+on, a population of about 160,000,000. There had been plenty of evidence obtainable at Shanghai, Hankow, Peking, and Tientsin, of the terrible ravages of opium in these regions, but it seemed advisable to make a journey into one of these unfortunate provinces and view the problem at short range. The nearest and most accessible was Shansi Province. It lies to the west and southwest of Peking, behind the blue mountains which one sees from the Hankow-Peking Railroad. There seemed to be no doubt that the opium curse could there be seen at its worst.
Everybody said so--legation officials, attaches, merchants, missionaries.
Dr. Piell, of the London Mission hospital at Peking, estimated that ninety per cent. of the men, women, and children in Shansi smoke opium. He called in one of his native medical a.s.sistants, who happened to be a Shansi man, and the a.s.sistant observed, with a smile, that ninety per cent. seemed pretty low as an estimate. Another point in Shansi's favour was that the railroads were pus.h.i.+ng rapidly through to T'ai Tuan-fu, the capital (and one of the oldest cities in oldest China). So I picked up an interpreter at the _Grand Hotel des Wagon-lits_, and went out there.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE VILLAGES WERE LITTLE MORE THAN HEAPS OF RUINS These Holes in the Ground are Occupied by Formerly Well-to-do Opium Smokers]
[Ill.u.s.tration: AT LAST HE CRAWLS OUT ON THE HIGHWAY, WHINING, CHATTERING AND PRAYING THAT A FEW COPPER CASH BE THROWN TO HIM]
The new Shansi railroad was not completed through to Tai-Yuan-fu, the provincial capital, and it was necessary to journey for several days by cart and mule-litter. While this sort of travelling is not the most comfortable in the world, it has the advantage of bringing one close to the life that swarms along the highroad, and of making it easier to gather facts and impressions.
Every hour or so, as the cart crawls slowly along, you come upon a dusty gray village nestling in a hollow or clinging to the hillside. And nearly every village is a little more than a heap of ruins. I was prepared to find ruins, but not to such an extent. When I first drew John, the interpreter's, attention to them, he said, ”Too much years.” As an explanation this was not satisfactory, because many of the ruined buildings were comparatively new--certainly, too new to fall to pieces. At the second village John made another guess at the cause of such complete disaster. ”Poor--too poor,” he said, and then traced it back to the last famine, about which, he found, the peasants were still talking. ”Whole lot o' mens die,” he explained. It was later on that I got at the main contributing cause of the wreck and ruin which one finds almost everywhere in Shansi Province, after I had picked up, through John and his cook, the roadside gossip of many days during two or three hundred miles of travel, after I had talked with missionaries of life-long experience, with physicians who are devoting their lives to work among these misery-ridden people, with merchants, travellers, and Chinese and Manchu officials.
Before we take up in detail the ravages of opium throughout this and other provinces, I wish to say a word about one source of information, which every observer of conditions in China finds, sooner or later, that he is forced to employ. Along the China coast one hears a good deal of talk about the ”missionary question.” Many of the foreign merchants abuse the missionaries. I will confess that the ”anti-missionary” side had been so often and so forcibly presented to me that before I got away from the coast I unconsciously shared the prejudice. But now, brus.h.i.+ng aside the exceptional men on both sides of the controversy, and ignoring for the moment the deeper significance of it, let me give the situation as it presented itself to me before I left China.
There are many foreign merchants who study the language, travel extensively, and speak with authority on things Chinese. But the typical merchant of the treaty port, that is, the merchant whom one hears so loudly abusing the missionaries, does not speak the language. He transacts most of his business through his Chinese ”_Compradore_,” and apparently divides the chief of his time between the club, the race-track, and various other places of amus.e.m.e.nt. This sort of merchant is the kind most in evidence, and it is he who contributes most largely to the anti-missionary feeling ”back home.” The missionaries, on the other hand, almost to a man, speak, read, and write one or more native dialects. They live among the Chinese, and, in order to carry on their work at all, they must be continually studying the traditions, customs, and prejudices of their neighbours. In almost every instance the missionaries who supplied me with information were more conservative than the British and American diplomatic, consular, military, and medical observers who have travelled in the opium provinces. I have since come to the conclusion that the missionaries are over-conservative on the opium question, probably because, being constantly under fire as ”fanatics” and ”enthusiasts,” they unconsciously lean too far towards the side of under-statement. The published estimates of Dr. Du Bose, of Soochow, president of the Anti-opium League, are much more conservative than those of Mr. Alex Hosie, the British commercial _attache_ and former consul-general. Dr.
Parker, of Shanghai, the gentlemen of the London Mission, the American Board, and the American Presbyterian Missions at Peking, scores of other missionaries whom I saw in their homes in the interior or at the missionary conference at Shanghai, and Messrs. Gaily, Robertson, and Lewis, of the International Young Men's Christian a.s.sociation, all impressed me as men whose opinions were based on information and not on prejudice. Dr. Morrison, the able Peking correspondent of the London _Times_, said to me when I arrived at the capital, ”You ought to talk with the missionaries.” I did talk with them, and among many different sources of information I found them worthy of the most serious consideration.
The phrase, ”opium province,” means, in China, that an entire province (which, in extent and in political outline, may be roughly compared to one of the United States) has been ravaged and desolated by opium. It means that all cla.s.ses, all ages, both s.e.xes, are sodden with the drug; that all the richer soil, which in such densely-populated regions, is absolutely needed for the production of food, is given over to the poppy; that the manufacture of opium, of pipes, of lamps, and of the various other accessories, has become a dominating industry; that families are wrecked, that merchants lose their ac.u.men, and labourers their energy; that after a period of wide-spread debauchery and enervation, economic, as well as moral and physical disaster, settles down over the entire region. The population of these opium provinces ranges from fifteen or twenty million to eighty million.
”In Shansi,” I have quoted an official as saying, ”everybody smokes opium.” Another cynical observer has said that ”eleven out of ten Shansi men are opium-smokers.” In one village an English traveller asked some natives how many of the inhabitants smoked opium, and one replied, indicating a twelve-year-old child, ”That boy doesn't.” Still another observer, an English scientist, who was born in Shansi, who speaks the dialect as well as he speaks English, and who travels widely through the remoter regions in search of rare birds and animals, puts the proportion of smokers as low as seventy-five per cent. of the total population. I had some talks with this man at T'ai Yuan-fu, and later at Tientsin, and I found his information so precise and so interesting that I asked him one day to dictate to a stenographer some random observations on the opium problem in Shansi. These few paragraphs make up a very small part of what I have heard him and others say, but they are so grimly picturesque, and they give so accurately the sense of the ma.s.s of notes and interviews which fill my journal of the Shansi trip, that it has seemed to me I could do no better than to print them just as he talked them off on that particular day at Tientsin.
”The opium-growers always take the best piece of land,” he said, ”in their land--the best fertilized, and with the most water upon it. They find that it pays them a great deal better than growing wheat or anything else.
Around Chao Cheng, especially, they grow opium to a large extent just beside the rivers, where they can get plenty of water. The seeds are sown about the beginning of May, and they have to be transplanted. It takes until about the middle of July before the opium ripens. Just before it is ripe men are employed to cut the seed pods, when a white sap exudes, and this dries upon the pod and turns brown, and in about a week after it has been cut they come around and sc.r.a.pe it off. The wages are from twenty to thirty cents (Mexican) per day. Men and women are employed in the work.
The heads of the poppy are all cut off, when they are dried and stored away for the seed of the next year.
”It is a very fragile crop, and until it gets to be nine inches high it is very easily broken. The full-grown poppy plant is from three to four feet high. The Chao Cheng opium is considered the best.
”In the Chao Cheng district the people have been more or less ruined by opium. I have heard of a family, a man and his wife, who had only one suit of clothes between them.