Note and Comment

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D.C. · Mar 8, 1906

The sudden awakening of the long-slumbering nations of eastern Asia, is an event not reckoned on by the European nations when, during the last century, they had dealings with the Asiatics which violated every principle of justice; such, for example, as England's forcing of the opium trade on China. Now, when China is seen to be undergoing a rapid transformation which bids fair to make her a world power, there is arising in some minds in England a feeling of apprehension that England may erelong be called to account for the wanton perpetration of so great a wrong upon the Chinese nation. An English journal says:—

With the arising of the Chinese empire out of its long sleep, there comes a conviction to many that England must yet face a day of reckoning for the crime of forcing opium upon the Chinese people. It is said that a hundred millions are suffering in China to-day from the opium curse. A C. M. S. missionary in Nanking says in the Christian: “In forcing this trade in a vile poison upon the formerly phlegmatic and pagan millions of the Chinese, merely for the sake of its paltry revenue, we have committed ‘commercial suicide,’ and that while in a state of unsound mind. This verdict is unanimous among the sanest and best-informed missionaries, consuls, and merchants in the far East.”