pay $21,000,000 indemnity, to cede in perpetuity to England the city
of Hong Kong, and to give free access to British ships entering
the ports of Canton, Amoy, Foochoofoo, Ningpo and Shanghai. The
importation of opium from India is still carried on--but the quantity
is not so great as formerly, owing to the cultivation of the plant in
China. The Hong Kong government has an opium farm, for which to-day it
receives a rental of $15,500 per month. The farmer sells on an average
from eight to ten _tins_ of opium daily, the tins being worth about
$150 each. His entire receipts from his sales of the drug are about
$45,000 per month. This opium farmer is well known to be the largest
smuggler of opium into China; and not without reason does Lord Charles
Beresford, in his book "The Break-up of China," say: "Thus,
indirectly the Hong Kong government derives a revenue by fostering
an illegitimate trade with a neighbouring and friendly Power, which
cannot be said to redound to the credit of the British Government. It
is in direct opposition to the sentiments and tradition of the laws of
the British Empire." It was here in Chinatown, in San Francisco, that
I was brought face to face with the havoc that is made through the
opium trade and the use of the pernicious drug in eating and smoking.
I was told that Europeans and Americans sometimes sought the
opium-joints for the purpose of indulgence in the vice of smoking.
Even women were known to make use of it in this way. The old man whom
I visited was lying on his left side, with his head slightly raised
on a hard pillow covered with faded leather. He took the pipe in his
right hand, the other, as I have already said, having been cut off in
the mines. Then he laid down the pipe by his side with the stem near
his mouth. The next movement was to take a kind of long rod, called a
dipper, with a sharp end and a little flattened. This he dipped in
the opium which had the consistency of thick molasses. He twisted the
dipper round and then held the drop which adhered to it over the lamp,