But China's trouble was not over. If she was to be debauched whether or no, must she also be ruined financially? There were the indemnity payments to meet, with interest; and no way of meeting them other than to squeeze tighter a poverty-stricken nation which was growing more poverty-stricken as her silver drained steadily off to the foreigners. There was a solution to the problem--a simple one. It was to permit the growth of opium in China itself, supplant the Indian trade, keep the silver at home. But China was slow to adopt this solution. It might solve the fiscal problem; but incidentally it might wreck China. She sounded England on the subject,--once, twice. There seemed to have been some idea that England, convinced that China had her own possibility of crowding out the Indian drug, might, after all, give up the trade, stop the production in India, and make the great step unnecessary. But England could not see it in that light. China wavered, then took the great step. The restrictions on opium-growing were removed. This was probably a mistake, though opinions still differ about that. To the men who stood responsible for a solution of Chinese fiscal problem it doubtless seemed necessary. At all events, the last barrier between China and ruin was removed by the Chinese themselves. And within less than half a century after the native growth of the poppy began, the white and pink and mauve blossoms have spread across the great empire, north and south, east and west, until to-day, in blossom-time almost every part of every province has its white and mauve patches. You may see them in Manchuria, on the edge of the great desert of Gobi, within a dozen miles of Peking; you may see them from the headwaters of the mighty Yangtse to its mouth, up and down the coast for two thousand miles, on the distant borders of Thibet.