One of the great grievances of which the Chinese complained, in the time of the East India Company monopoly, and down to the Pottinger war, was the "oozing out" of the silver in China for the payment of a poisonous drug to the "outer barbarians." It was, however, then the fact, as it is the fact now, that the poppy is widely cultivated, and opium largely manufactured, by the Chinese themselves in several of the provinces of the empire. It used to be the belief in China that there alone was the pure metal produced, and that the coins brought from afar would in process of time be converted, by natural process, into base metal, or something worse. I recollect a person being charged with stealing his master's money; he did not deny having had the custody of the dollars, but swore they had been eaten by white ants. Keshen was directed to give his opinion to the emperor as to the quality of the silver brought to China by foreigners, and these are his words: "The foreign money brought from these outer nations is all boiled and reduced by quicksilver. If you wrap it up and lay it aside for several years without touching it, it will be turned into moths and corroding insects, and the silver cups made from it by these strangers will change into feathers." After stating that the coins show their impurity when submitted to the crucible, he adds: "Yet we find that in Kiangnan and by the course of the river Hwac, and {104} all along the rivers to the south, foreign dollars are used in trade and circulated most abundantly; we even find them of more value than Sycee silver; this is really what I cannot understand!" Truly it passeth all understanding if the premises of the mandarin be correct. Some one suggests that Keshen had read in our sacred book of our treasures "that moth and rust do corrupt" (Matt. vi. 19), and of the "riches" which "make to themselves wings and fly away" (Prov. xxiii. 5).