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Rh Chinese crop. The reader who has realised the magnitude of the task will naturally ask, What are the prospects of success? He is a rash man who ventures to dogmatise on matters concerning China. But the traveller in Western China who has passed through its miles of poppy-fields, who has studied the expression on the faces of its magistrates and weighed their words when discoursing upon the subject, will pay tribute to every word of Sir Edward Grey's considered expression of opinion when he said in the House of Commons on May 6th, 1908, that "to attempt to put an end to a national habit in ten years was an effort which any European Government would have been unwilling to face."

That there are enlightened men in China who are earnestly desirous of suppressing the evil, is in no way open to doubt. One of the leading merchants in Ch'ung-k'ing was actively denouncing the habit at the time of my visit; and it was reported that at Fu-chou, the centre of the opium cultivation in Ssŭch'uan, a landowner had given out that no more poppyseed was to be sown on his land. A little later