What, then, are the effects of opium-smoking on the Chinese individually and as a nation? Had they been anything like what the anti-opiumists assert they must be, surely the effect would be visible after all these years in an increased death-rate or a decreased birth-rate. Needless to say, no such aggregate result is observable. Where opium is most smoked, there the population is most thriving and industrious,[74] and increases the fastest. "No China resident," says Dr. Ayres, colonial surgeon at Hongkong, "believes in the terrible frequency of the dull, sodden-witted, debilitated opium-smoker, met with in print." Mr. Gregory, H.M.'s Consul at Swatow, says: "I have _never_ seen a single case of opium intoxication, although living with and travelling for months and hundreds of miles with opium-smokers."[75] Dr. Myers, after ten years' medical practice in different parts of China, confesses that his "preconceived prejudices with reference to the universally baneful effects of the drug had been severely shaken." Again, it was estimated by the colonial surgeon at Hongkong, in 1855, that there were more deaths from drunkenness in Hongkong among the 600 Europeans than from opium among the 60,000 Chinamen. Similar testimony is borne by a recent medical report of the Straits Settlements,[76] wherein, under the head "poisons," it appears that there were from alcoholic poisoning thirty-nine deaths, of which twenty-six were Europeans, three Chinese, one Malay, nine Indians; while from opium only five in all--a result all the more significant as there are at least 300,000 Chinese in the Straits Settlements,[77] and only about 4,000 Europeans, including the military. Dr. Hobson, another medical missionary, and as such entirely averse to the trade, says: "Opium-smoking is not nearly so fatal to life as spirit-drinking is with us; its use is even compatible with longevity." It is very common to hear Chinese acknowledge that they have smoked opium for ten, twenty, or thirty years. Dr. Hobson mentions one case in which the smoker began at nineteen, and smoked for fifty-one years.[78] Further evidence is surely unnecessary to prove that opium-smoking is not necessarily, nor even commonly, destructive of life. Even opium-eating, _a far worse vice_, for it "sets up an incessant and cumulative craving, so that a rapid increase of dose is necessary"--not even opium-eating is inevitably fatal, as the case of the Rajpoots proves. De Quincey, as is well known, took 8,000 drops of laudanum a day for some time, which is equivalent to thirty-two grains, and two grains of opium swallowed are equal in effects to fifty-eight grains (one mace) smoked, three mace being a smoker's usual allowance.[79]