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covered the danger, they associated it wholly with the use of the imported article. In a word, failing to see that the trouble lay, not with the arrival of a specially prepared form of opium from abroad, but with the introduction of a new manner of using the drug, and that the difference between the mischievous effects of foreign and of native opium was merely a difference of degree, Chinese legislators attributed a comparatively innocuous character to the domestic product and framed vetoes solely against the foreign.

That is the sole explanation of their inconsistency. But it is plainly an explanation to which permanent validity cannot be assigned. More accurate knowledge could not fail to be acquired in Peking sooner or later, and that it was actually acquired may be seen from the annals. Thus, in 1838, when the Cabinet Minister, Chu Tsun, submitted his celebrated memorial against opium, his language shows that he did not suspect the native article of being harmless. He did indeed claim for it inferiority of preparation and want of novelty, but, at the same time, he anticipated with keen apprehension the extension of poppy cultivation to fertile districts then employed in raising food stuffs. Still the expediency of attempting to put an end to the growth of the plant in China did not apparently present itself to him. He and his fellow-statesmen in Peking seem to have thought that unless they could begin by cutting off the foreign sup-