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CHINESE OPIUM TRAFFIC.

THE NEW AGREEMENT. By Telecraph-Fress Association-Goflyriaht Peking, May 10. An Imperial Edict, describing Great Britain's signature to the opium agreement as a generous act, exhorts tho provincial authorities to independently endeavour to suppress tho growth of tho poppy and to fulfil the wishes of a' friendly nation. THE CURSE OF CHINA. The British in China never imagined whan their Government undertook to end the shipping of opium if the- Chinese would at the same time cease growing it, wrote Mr. Frederick Moore in the "Daily News" recently, that the yellow man would be ohlo to fulfil his part of the bargain. It lias been predicted in every book written about China that the Chinese would never be able to give up the use of the drug. Britishers here never contemplated seriously the abolition of tho traffic. But the Chinaman has already actually accomplished in largo measure what was called impossible. The "Peking Gazette" recently announced that a new regulation had been framed prescribing that all opium smoking must stop at the end of the Sixth Moon, in the. 4th' year of Hsuantung, that is in two years from now. "Officials below tho fifth rank," it reads, "who shall be found smoking after that date, will bo cashiered, and handed over to ithe local authorities, to be placed under surveillaneo for a period of three years. Ordinary persons will be punished with imprisonment for seven years."

There is. of course, a weak point in this ordinance—namely, that under it officials of the first four grades evidently go unpunished. But this is China, and equal justice to all men cannot in a day take the place of centuries of discrimination.

Of course, the testimony of the Chinese Government is always likely to be unreliable. But, even if the evidence of thu various foreign consuls, including the British themselves, were not sufficient to confirm Chines* declarations as to the suppression of the growth of opium, the argument of price in incontrovertible. The price of opium in China has risen sevenfold or eightfold in the past three years, since the reduction in output began.

It is snitl that Hie poorer classes, who have, hitherto smoked the cheaper native product, find it easier to shake off the habit because (ho home-grown opium is so much lighter than Indian.

Permanent link to this item

https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/DOM19110512.2.53

Bibliographic details

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1125, 12 May 1911, Page 5

Word Count
386

CHINESE OPIUM TRAFFIC. Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1125, 12 May 1911, Page 5

CHINESE OPIUM TRAFFIC. Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1125, 12 May 1911, Page 5

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