The Opium Curse in China.
Not long since Mr. Atwood, of the Shanse, China, Mission, writing of the “Opium Curse,” said:— “A large number of patients have received medicine and treatment, not only from this village but from other villages not far away. We concluded to charge a fee of about a dollar for admission to the Opium Refuge. Although this caused some dissatisfaction at first, and some would not come on account of it, they are now coming in, and we shall soon have more applications probably than we can provide room for. “We are having a better class of patients now than we had last summer—men from whom we expect better results than followed the work of last summer. A large share of those men have confessed that they have returned to the use of the drug, though in smaller quantities. . . . I suppose we ought not to expect permanent reformation until the stronger motives presented in the gospel are known and felt by them, and even then we are told by those older in experience that a church member who is a reformed opium smoker is to be spoken of with fear and trembling. “The prospect before us is not bright when we take into account the fact that in the cities nine-tenths of the men and all the women, probably, are slaves to the drug; while in the villages the number of those who use it is far above one-half, and probably more than two-thirds, of all the people. At the present rate of increase in the use of the drug, a few decades more will suffice almost to depopulate the plain. Should another famine occur soon, it would precipitate this calamity upon them with dire certainty, so great is their poverty. The most discouraging feature about it is that they do not want to give up the habit. They cling to it as if it were the dearest boon.”