It is the fact that the eating of opium (for it is not “smoked” there) does very little harm in India, since it is not used by a large proportion of the people nor in excess. Many persons who have studied the subject maintain that the widely-spread injury caused by opium in China is due to the short time during which it has been in use there as compared with India. It is held that a population after a few centuries becomes immune to such poisonous but attractive indulgences by the killing out of those who cannot resist excess—and the suggestion is that the simplest way of dealing with such cravings for poison is to let those who have them and cannot resist their demand, freely indulge and die, and their stock with them. This is, however, a slow and tedious way of eradicating an evil tendency. It may, perhaps, be the only way, and hereafter, when the production by careful and restricted breeding of a sound and healthy population becomes recognised as being part of the duty of the makers and administrators of the law in civilised states, it is not improbable that we shall see something of the kind deliberately put into practice. The opium-pipe and the mode of smoking at present in use in China are very different from the pipe and smoking of tobacco used there or elsewhere. I investigated the matter myself twenty years ago in an opium-den near the London Docks, under the instruction of a polite Chinaman. The opium-pipe has a very narrow cavity, about one-sixth of an inch wide. The prepared opium, in a condition resembling treacle, is smeared on the walls of the cavity with a pin, and the pipe is held to a lighted lamp. The flame drawn into the pipe causes the opium to frizzle and give off smoke, but it does not “light” and continue to burn. Each whiff which the smoker inhales has to be procured by applying the pipe to the lamp. The smoke is tasteless, and it requires a good deal of patience and several re-smearings of the inside of the pipe before the smoker begins to experience the pleasant effects of the drug. These consist in the production of a sense of perfect contentment and indifference to all trouble and care, whilst the imagination gives a rose-colour, or an even more alluring aspect, to all that one sees or thinks of—until a gentle sleep closes the scene.