I now confront Mr. Storrs Turner with another book, which everyone must admit is of greater authority than his. It is a book published towards the close of 1881 by a high official of the Chinese Government, then Mr. but now Sir Robert Hart, G.C.M.G., the Inspector-General of Chinese Customs, a man who knows China and the Chinese better, perhaps, than any living European. That gentleman tells a very different tale about opium to what the Anti-Opium Society has hitherto regaled the world with. This book is an official one, issued from the Statistical Department of the Inspector-General of Chinese Customs at Shanghai for the use and guidance of the Chinese Government. It stands upon a very different footing to the volume published by Mr. Turner, the paid secretary and strenuous advocate of the Anti-Opium Society. Sir Robert Hart has entire control over the revenue of China as far as regards foreign trade. At every treaty port open to foreign vessels there is a foreign Commissioner of Customs, and Sir Robert Hart is the supreme head of these commissioners. He is a man deservedly trusted and respected by the Chinese Government; a man of learning and talents, and I need hardly add of the very highest character, and, I believe, he is one of the most accomplished Chinese scholars that could be found. He says that opium has been grown in China from a remote period, and was smoked there before a particle of foreign opium ever came into the country. This is the passage from his--the now famous yellow-book:-- In addition to the foreign drug there is also the native product. Reliable statistics cannot be obtained respecting the total quantity produced. Ichang, the port nearest to Szechwan, the province which is generally believed to be the chief producer and chief consumer of native opium, estimates the total production of native opium at twenty-five thousand chests annually; while another port, Ningpo, far away on the coast, estimates it at two hundred and sixty-five thousand. Treating all such replies as merely so many guesses, there are, it is to be remarked, two statements which may be taken as facts in this connection: the one is that, so far as we know to-day, the native opium produced does not exceed the foreign import in quantity; _and the other that native opium was known, produced, and used long before any Europeans began the sale of the foreign drug along the coast_.