I do not now refer to the miserable and grovelling Chinese, who are
fed on it almost from the cradle, but to the ordinary cases of
educated and intellectual men in this country and in Europe; and I
assert that, could there be a realization of all the aspirations, all
the longings after the pure, the good and noble that fill the mind and
pervade the heart of a cultivated and refined man who takes to this
drug, he would be indeed the paragon of animals. And I go further and
say that, given a man of cultivated mind, high moral sentiment, and a
keen sense of intellectual enjoyment, blended with strong imaginative
powers, and just in proportion as he is so endowed will the
difficulty be greater in weaning himself from it. I mean, of course,
before the will is killed. When that takes place he is of necessity as
powerless as any other victim, and his craving for it is as automatic
as in the case of any other opium slave. What he becomes then, I have
attempted to describe, and in doing so have suppressed much in
consideration of the feelings of those who read.
This it is to be an opium-eater; and the boldest may well quail at the
picture, drawn not by the hand of fancy, but by one who has supped of
its horrors to the full, and who has found that the staff on which he
leaned has proven a spear which has well-nigh pierced him to the
heart. Let no man believe he will escape: the bond matures at last.
ROBERT HALL--JOHN RANDOLPH--WM. WILBERFORCE,
The compiler has hesitated as to the propriety of calling attention to
the opium-habits of these eminent men, both because little instruction
is afforded by the meagre information that is accessible to him
respecting their use of opium, and because he apprehends their example
may be pleaded in extenuation of the habit. Yet they were confirmed
opium-eaters, and remained such to the day of their death; and a
reference to their cases may not be without its lesson to that large
class of men eminent in public or professional life, who already are,
or are in danger of becoming, victims of the opium tyranny, as well as
to that larger class who find in undiscriminating denunciations of bad
habits, a cheap method of exhibiting a cheap philanthropy.
ROBERT HALL.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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