While still at Peking, I had picked up more or less gossip which seemed to indicate that the Tientsin foreign concessions were setting an unfortunate example in the matter of opium. In several of the concessions there are thousands of Chinese traders who have crowded in the white man's territory, in order to make a living. These Chinese districts demand their opium, and they have always been allowed to have it. The opium shops and dens are licensed, as are our saloons, and the resulting revenue is cheerfully accepted by the various municipalities. When the Chinese officials set out to fight opium last winter and spring, they asked the foreign consuls to cooperate with them. This could be no more than a friendly request, for the concessions are foreign soil, that have passed wholly out of China's control; but it was obviously of no use to close the dens of the native city if smokers could continue to gratify their desire by simply walking down the road. This request bothered the consuls. The Chinese had adroitly placed them in a difficult position. A failure to cooperate would look bad; but revenue is revenue, on the Chinese Coast as elsewhere. More, if they could play for time, the enforcement in the native city, by driving the smokers over into the concessions, would actually increase the revenue. So the consuls played for time. They spread the impression "back home" that they were going to close the dens. When? Oh, soon--very soon. There were matters of detail to attend to. The licenses must run out. Then, too, perhaps the Chinese proposals were "insincere"--a little time would show. The British concession boasted proudly that it had no opium dens. This was true. The concession is wholly taken up with British shops and British homes, and there is no room for Chinese residents. The German concession had so few natives that it closed some of its dens and took what credit it could. The Japanese quietly put on the lid. But all the other concessions remained "wide open." So ran the Peking gossip. It seemed to me worth while to follow it up; for if it should prove true that the concessions were actually profiting, like Shanghai, by the native prohibition, that fact would be significant. It would leave little to say for the representatives of foreign civilization in China. There was a particular reason why the prohibition should be made effective in and about Tientsin. The one official who stood before his country and the world as the anti-opium leader, who personified, in fact, the reform spirit which is leavening the Chinese mass, was Yuan Shi K'ai, the Northern viceroy. Tientsin was his viceregal capital. Before he could hope to convince the cynical observers of Britain and Europe that the anti-opium crusade was really on, he had to make good in his own city.