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, brushing 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.