The demand for opium, and consequently its price, increased remarkably, and the numerous statements which have been published under this head have not been by any means exaggerated. It penetrated the most secret haunts, in proportion as the danger of using it more publicly increased; and the more numerous were the edicts which were issued against it, the greater did the craving for the forbidden luxury, amounting almost to a national MANIA, go on increasing day by day. The moral lectures of the emperor, which appeared in the Pekin Gazette, were very pretty to read, but very futile in their effects. And if the great despotic ruler over hundreds of millions of people, whose very word was law, still found himself totally unable to exclude the drug (even under the severest prohibitions) from his _own palace_, is it to be wondered at that all his strongest measures should have totally failed in withdrawing the mass of the nation from the temptation? The enormous profits derived from the clandestine sale of opium induced many of the Chinese to embark in it as a speculation, who neither used it themselves, nor were habituated to any other commercial traffic. Official men both smoked and _sold it_; hundreds of people gained a livelihood by the manufacture or sale of opium-pipes, and other apparatus connected with its use; and even the armed soldier often carried an opium-pipe in his girdle, with the same unconcern as he did the fan-case which is very commonly a part of his costume. All this was going on throughout a great portion of the empire during the time that the question of its legalization or of its sterner prohibition was being so warmly debated at court, and discussed throughout the country. But the general impression was, that the importation of the drug would be legalized, and there was little apprehension of the violent persecution which soon commenced. Instead of the foreigners imposing upon them the barter of opium as a condition of trade, it was the Chinese themselves who begged and prayed that it might be supplied to them; who sought out the opium-selling vessels at long distances, and were even then only permitted to receive it by paying hard cash for it. So determined were the Chinese to possess it at any cost, that they frequently were willing to purchase it for _its own weight_ in silver, balanced fairly the one against the other in the scales. Boats belonging to the Custom House engaged in the traffic. The governor of Canton himself, Tang by name, was known to have employed his own boat to fetch it; and so publicly and undisguisedly was the traffic carried on, that a stipulated sum was paid to the officers for every chest landed, precisely as if it had been a bale of cotton or a box of glass.