It was partly to answer this question that I went to China. I did not leave China until I had arrived at an answer that seemed convincing. If, in presenting the facts in these columns, the picture I have been painting of China's problem should verge on the painful, that, I am afraid, will be the fault of the facts. It is a picture of the hugest empire in the whole world, fighting a curse which has all but mastered it, turning for aid, in sheer despair, to the government, that has brought it to the edge of ruin. Strange to say, this British government, as it is to-day constituted, would apparently like to help. But, across the path of assistance stands, like a grotesque, inhuman dragon,--the Indian Revenue. VIII THE POSITION OF GREAT BRITAIN An observant correspondent recently wrote from Shanghai to a New York newspaper: "China has missed catching the fire of the West in the manner of Japan, and has lain idle and supine while neighbour and foreigner despoiled her. Her statesmanship has been languid and irresolute, and her armies slow and spiritless in the field. Observers who know China, and are familiar at the same time with the symptoms of opium, say that it is as if the listless symptoms of the drug were to be seen in the very nation itself. Many conclude that the military and political inertia of the Chinese is due to the special prevalence of the opium habit among the two classes of Chinamen directly responsible: both the soldiers and the scholars, among whom all the civil and political posts are held in monopoly, are notoriously addicted to opium."