amusingly wrote as follows, his imagination
supplying his facts: “Though it comes from a most stinking place, it is
itself most fragrant. It is found sticking like gum to the beards of
he-goats, which collect it from the woods.”
Now Japan should obey the humanitarian sentiment of the world, and
stamp out opium in her Formosan colony. The opium conferences at
Shanghai in 1909 and the Hague in 1911, called by America and presided
over by the American, Bishop Brent, have produced wonderful results.
It now remains for the western nations to emulate China’s example and
stamp out morphia. China could well come back at America and say: “What
are _you_ going to do about morphine and hypodermic syringes? You
import yearly 500,000 pounds of opium, and you use only 70,000 pounds
in medicine. As far as morphine goes you are more ‘doped’ than all
the nations combined. You import 200,000 ounces of cocaine each year,
of which only 15,000 ounces are used in medicine.” The exportation of
India opium will cease in 1918, and China will have ceased to grow the
poppy this year. In the heat of the debates in England, Eric Lewis, a
Welsh supporter of Lloyd George’s, proposed that England should buy
all the opium in India, like the famous Chinese Commissioner Lin of
Canton, dump it in the sea, and indemnify by a loan of $40,000,000 the
poppy growers of Bengal. Now let us cease to criticize Britain, for if
she grossly sinned, she has repented and made amends, as could now be
expected of a Britain which has recently established national pensions
for her aged, and brought her educational extension, employers’
liability and land taxation up to the mark set by America.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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