sanitation; of a land where the smallpox is a lesser menace beside the leprosy, plague, tuberculosis, that rage simply at will, and beside famines so colossal in their sweep, that the overtaxed Western mind simply refuses to comprehend them. And De Quincey's words have come to me: "What was it that drove me into the habitual use of opium? Misery--blank desolation--settled and abiding darkness----?" These words help to clear it up. China was a wonderful field, ready prepared for the ravages of opium--none better. The mighty currents of trade did the rest. The balance sheet reigned supreme as by right. The balance sheet reigns to-day. But we must get on with our narrative. I will try to pass it along in the form in which it has presented itself to me. If Clean and Dirty appear in closer and more puzzling alliance than we like to see them, I cannot help that. It was not easy getting opium, the commodity, into the currents of trade. There was an obstacle. The Chinese were not an opium-consuming race. They did not use opium, they did not want opium, they steadily resisted the inroads of opium. But the rulers of the company were far-seeing men. Tempt misery long enough and it will take to opium. Two centuries ago when small quantities of the drug were brought in from Java, the Chinese government objected. In 1729 the importation was prohibited. As late as 1765, this importation, carried on by energetic traders in spite of official resistance, had never exceeded two hundred chests a year. But with the advent of the company in 1773, the trade grew. In spite of a second Chinese prohibition in 1796, half-heartedly enforced by corrupt mandarins, the total for 1820 was 4,000 chests. The Chinese government was faced not only with the possibility of a race debauchery but also with an immediate and alarming drain of silver from the country. The balance of the trade was against them. Either as an economic or moral problem, the situation was grave. The smoking of opium began in China and is peculiar to the Chinese. The Hindoos and Malays eat it. Complicated and wide-spread as the smoking habit is to-day, it is a modern custom as time runs in China. There seems to be little doubt in the minds of those Sinologues who have traced the opium thread back to the tangle of early missionary reports and imperial edicts, that the habit started either in Formosa or on the mainland across the Straits, where malaria is common. Opium had been used, generations before, as a remedy for malaria; and these first smokers seem to have mixed a little opium with their tobacco, which had been introduced by the Portuguese in the early seventeenth century. From this beginning, it would appear, was developed the rather elaborate outfit which the opium-smoker of to-day considers necessary to his pleasure.