When it has been manufactured, the opium must be disposed of in one way and another; accordingly: "The supply of prepared opium required for consumption in India is made over to the Excise Department.... The chests of 'provision' opium, for export, are sold by auction at monthly sales, which take place at Calcutta." For the meaning of the curious term, "provision opium," we have only to read on a little further. "The opium is received and prepared at the government factories, where the out-turn for the year included 8,774 chests of opium for the Excise Department, about 300 pounds of various opium alkaloids, thirty maunds of medical opium, and 51,770 chests of provision opium for the Chinese market." There are about 140 pounds in a chest. Four grains of opium, administered in one dose to a person unaccustomed to its use, is apt to prove fatal. Last year the government had under poppy cultivation 654,928 acres. And the revenue to the treasury, including returns from auction sales, duties, and license fees, and deducting all "opium expenditures," was nearly $22,000,000 (L4,486,562). The best grade of opium-poppy bears a white blossom. One sees mauve and pink tints in a field, at blossom-time, but only the seeds from the white flowers are replanted. The opium of commerce is made from the gum obtained by gashing the green seed pod with a four-bladed knife. After the first gathering, the pod is gashed a second time, and the gum that exudes makes an inferior quality of opium. The raw opium from the country districts is sent down to the government factories in earthenware jars, worked up in mixing vats, and made into balls about six or eight inches in diameter. The balls, after a thorough drying on wooden racks, are packed in chests and sent down to the auction. [Illustration: KNEADING CRUDE OPIUM WITH OIL TO MAKE ROUND OR FLAT CAKES] [Illustration: MAKING ROUND CAKES OF OPIUM] The men who buy in the opium at these monthly auctions and afterwards dispose of it at the Chinese ports are a curious crowd of Parsees, Mohammedans, Hindoos, and Asiatic Jews. Few British names appear in the opium trade to-day. British dignity prefers not to stoop beneath the taking in of profits; it leaves the details of a dirty business to dirty hands. This is as it has been from the first. The directors of the East India Company, years and years before that splendid corporation relinquished the actual government of India, forbade the sending of its specially-prepared opium direct to China, and advised a trading station on the coast whence the drug might find its way, "without the company being exposed to the disgrace of being engaged in an illicit commerce." So clean hands and dirty hands went into partnership. They are in partnership still, save that the most nearly Christian of governments has officially succeeded the company as party of the first part. And sixty-five tons of Indian opium go to China every week.