The garden lies along the bank of the Ganges, about six miles south of the city, and is filled with trees and plants of the rarest varieties and the greatest beauty you can imagine.  No other garden will equal it except perhaps that at Colombo.  It is 272 acres in extent, has a large number of ponds and lakes, and many fine avenues of palms, mahogany, mangos, tamarinds, plantains and other trees, and its greatest glory is a banyan tree which is claimed to be the largest in the world.

A banyan, as you know, represents a miniature forest rather than a single tree, because it has branches which grow downward as well as upward, and take root in the ground and grow with great rapidity.  This tree is about 135 years old.  The circumference of its main trunk five and a half feet from the ground is 51 feet.  Its topmost leaf is eighty-five feet from the ground.  It has 464 aerial roots, as the branches which run down to the ground are called, and the entire tree is 938 feet in circumference.  It is large enough to shelter an entire village under its foliage.

Several other remarkable trees are to be found in that garden.  One of them is called “The Crazy Tree,” because about thirty-five different varieties of trees have been grafted upon the same trunk, and, as a consequence, it bears that many different kinds of leaves.  Its foliage suggests a crazy quilt.

Benares is the center of the opium traffic of India, which, next to the land tax, is the most productive source of revenue to the government.  It is a monopoly inherited from the Moguls in the middle ages and passed down from them through the East India Company to the present government, and the regulations for the cultivation, manufacture and sale of the drug have been very little changed for several hundred years.  There have been many movements, public, private, national, international, religious and parliamentary, for its suppression; there have been many official inquiries and investigations; volumes have been written setting forth all the moral questions involved, and it is safe to say that every fact and argument on both sides has been laid before the public; yet it is an astonishing fact that no official commission or legally constituted body, not a single Englishman who has been personally responsible for the well-being of the people of India or has even had an influential voice in the affairs of the empire or has ever had actual knowledge and practical experience concerning the effects of opium, has ever advocated prohibition either in the cultivation of the poppy or in the manufacture of the drug.  Many have made suggestions and recommendations for the regulation and restriction of the traffic, and the existing laws are the result of the experience of centuries.  But anti-opium movements have been entirely in the hands of missionaries, religious and moral agitators in England and elsewhere outside of India, and politicians who have denounced the policy of the government to obtain votes against the party that happened to be in power.