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198 foreign and native opium be equally and completely eradicated. Let the Government Council frame such measures as may be suitable and necessary for strictly forbidding the consumption of the drug and the cultivation of the poppy, and let them submit their proposals for our approval."

Most people who have any personal knowledge of China and the opium traffic will be disposed to concur with his Majesty's Minister at Peking when he declared that the proposition set forth in this pithy exhortation constitutes a reform of a character "rarely attempted with success in the course of history."

That, however, is the business of the Chinese Government, and the question which Great Britain has to consider is not so much the magnitude of the task to which China has set her hand, as the manner in which she can best aid her in her laudable endeavours to eradicate what is admittedly an immense evil. With the introduction of the vicious opium habit the British had nothing to do; but it is not denied that British traders did not hesitate