The real test of the prohibition movement is to come in the great interior provinces of the South, Yunnan and Kweichou, and in the huge western province of Sze-chuan. It is in these regions that opium has had its strongest grip on the people, and where the financial and agricultural phases of the problems are most acute. All observers recognized that it was unfair to expect immediate and complete prohibition in these regions, where opium-growing is quite as grave a question as opium-smoking. The beginning of the enforcement in Sze-chuan seems to have been cautious but sincere. In this one province the share of the imperial tax on opium alone, over and above local needs, amounts to more than $2,000,000 (gold), and, thanks to the constant demands of the foreign powers for their "indemnity" money, the imperial government is hardly in a position to forego its demands on the provinces. But recognizing that a new revenue must be built up to supplant the old, the three new opium commissioners of Sze-chuan have begun by preparing addresses explaining the evils of opium, and sending out "public orators" to deliver them to the people. They have also used the local newspapers extensively for their educational work; and they have sent out the provincial police to make lists of all opium-smokers, post their names on the outside of their houses, and make certain that they will be debarred from all public employment and from posts of honour. The chief commissioner, Tso, declares that he will clear Chen-tu, the provincial capital, a city of 400,000 inhabitants, of opium within four years; and no one seems to doubt that he will do it as effectively as he has cleared the streets of the beggars for which Chen-tu was formerly notorious. When Mr. J. G. Alexander, of the British Anti-Opium Society, was in Chen-tu last year, this same Commissioner Tso called a mass-meeting for him, at which the native officials and gentry sat on the platform with representatives of the missionary societies, and ten thousand Chinese crowded about to hear Mr. Alexander's address.