Recently people have been congratulating themselves that opium has been shut out of China. It is a cause of rejoicing; it would be a cause of still greater rejoicing if all the other substitutes which are taken for opium could be shut out likewise. As it is, American and English cigaret manufacturers are reaping the profit of the perverted appetite. The Chinese have turned to the cigaret, and following that will come whisky. One writer declares there are only two kinds of American business which will thrive in China; tobacco and Standard Oil. China could fence herself against the marauding Tartars two thousand years ago by the great wall. It can not keep out what is worse than all the Tartars—the American cigaret. They come into China in one unending stream and they will, too, have their effect. A long use of opium has prepared the appetite for inordinate consumption of tobacco. The effect will be seen upon the race. We are also told that American drugs, patent medicines by the ton, are going to China, and in many of these things they will get the opium as truly as they did in the pure drug itself; and it will have the same degenerating effect. Right in connection with this comes the statement by a woman as prominent as Mrs. Ophelia Amigh, head of the State Training-school for Girls, at Geneva, Ill., who declares that “the American woman of the fashionable set lives in a whirl of unhealthful stress and excitement, sleeps too little, and keeps her nerves constantly on the qui vive. She tipples and drugs for headache and insomnia, due to her unhygienic mode of life; she is often a degenerate and the mother of a degenerate, if indeed she is a mother at all. This drinking among women is getting to be more common than we are willing to believe, and it is one of the greatest dangers with which we are confronted to-day. The hurry and fret of American life are turning out degenerates at a rate that will one day stagger the world.” “We have received more than 1,400 girls into our school, and with few exceptions they have been children of alcohol inheritance.” “The number of moral imbeciles that come to us is simply appalling, and you have object-lessons enough right here in Chicago, New York, and other cities. Degenerate theatricals have much to do with it.” It is people of this class who are multiplying the insane and unbalanced. For instance, the annual report of the State Board of Insanity in Massachusetts notes an increase in that state from 1906 to 1908 of 1,679; a total in the state of 12,050. New commitments are constantly increasing. The Springfield Republican truly says, “This is not an encouraging view.” It is these increasingly unbalanced ones, many of whom are outside of asylums, that furnish the class of whom Senator Lodge speaks in a recent speech: “To-day,” he says, “we seem almost to have reached the point where the sympathy is so strictly confined to the criminal, that there is none left for the victim of the crime.”