Within the last hundred years that process of degeneration has been hastened by two incidental afflictions--spring floods and summer droughts. The rapid increase of population has driven home-seekers into the highlands of the far west, and the destruction of land-protecting forests avenged itself in the usual manner. Every heavy snowfall in the mountains became a menace to the settlers of the lowlands; a sudden thaw was always apt to turn brooks into rivers and rivers into raging seas. The summers, at the same time, became warmer and drier. Famines, such as only India had seen before, crowded the cities with refugees. Charitable institutions were managed by agents of a paternal government, and paupers were rarely suffered to perish in wayside ditches, but hundreds of thousands were huddled together in parish suburbs and fed on minimum rations of the cheapest available food. It was then that the masses were forced to apostatize from the dietetic tenets of Buddhism; abstinence from animal food became impossible; sanitary scruples had to be disregarded; whole settlements of famine victims were compelled to subsist exclusively on offal. Millions of mechanics had to fight to struggle for existence by reducing their wants. The prices of food had doubled, and in order to pay the cost of one daily meal all luxuries had to be relinquished. Sleep and oblivion of misery became the only alternatives of hopeless toil, and those who could save a few _taels_ yielded to the temptation of supplementing those blessings by means of chemical anodynes. Opium-smoking became a national vice. The ‘opium war’ did not rivet the yoke of that curse. It merely clinched the grip of a British trading company. The Chinese government had attempted to cancel their franchise, but only with a view to diverting its profits into the pockets of their own speculators. The total suppression of the traffic would have been not only difficult, but practically impossible. We might as well try to prohibit tobacco in North America. Yet the results of these coöperating factors of degeneracy have stopped short of the extremes that might have been expected in a land of earth-despisers. Buddhism in its orthodox Chinese form is radically pessimistic. It inculcates a belief in the worthlessness of all terrestrial blessings, and considers life a disease, with no cure but death. And not death by suicide, either; the victims of misery must drain life’s cup to the dregs, to cure the very love of existence, and thus prevent the risk of re-birth.