OPIUM SMOKING.

Timaru Herald, Volume LVII, Issue 6064, 25 September 1894, Page 4

OPIUM SMOKING.

♦ ■■■ ' A writer m Temple Bar says of Chinese opium smoking :— For » Chinaman I venture to corroborate the view that phy«ioally it'a not guoh a bad thing after all. Look at hit environment No exercise. No papers. No buoke. No mniio. No wife, m tin sympa' thetio leuse No dogs, no cartridges to make, oo billiards ; no whisky, no fireside, no easy ohair. Chinamen have wrettled with this ennuyeux condition with all the aubterfuges of protraction that the most ingenious invention ooold suggest. They have a theatre that lasts for five honra.and then sends them home dead, or at {east deaf; but as men's Htm are al«

most as limited »a v oat'e, they can't etivnd it more than onoe a week. They spread tieir meals over two or three hours, and cook them to excellently that thoy are far from surfeited ; but with the aid of the melon seei', another ingenious di.csvery of protraotion, oao go an eating m the interval until the next meal ojmes round. They h»»e novels and pamphle s that have been known 'o take six generations from the Conqueror dimnwards to get through ; m these oases tho fao ily generally dies out with the man who tees where the title oome's m. They hava a pipe that holds one whiff, and has to be olenned out and refilled for the next, and instead of matches, a blottiog.paper spill which has to be scientifically blown for two minutes before it inflame. They have roads prow Jed with every conceivable stumbling-block m. the shape, of unleval paving atones, holes, and cuttings, that go round instead of across every field or grave they can b» nny con* oeivable itreton of imagination touch, like the oanal at Kaotsu, that traverses * mile m fifty yards dirtot for f»ar the water should run away and disappear. But the most 1 brilliant and suooossful device was the opium pipe. Anyone can go and iwellow a handful of the drug or drink off a b >ttle of its oonooetion, and kill themselves m five minutes ; or yon oan take it m pills and kill yourself m a year But he c you have a means of ruining tho lining cfyjur stomach and your purae, of estranging nil your friends and relationr,of holding yourself up aa a blot oh and' abhorrence to the oaloi eelf-satufied horizon of philanthropic b*er nwigpers, and of p-oviding a swollen revenue to a h»»ed foreigner and an inedible government, and yet drag along m your misery aad etj jyment with redoubled energy for yean and year* and years i Little ooula that wag of a wandering quack have ezpeoted to produoe suoh stupendous results when be hobbled along hawking bis poppy juioe tobaooa as a new oure for the dysentery.