We confess, however, we have looked for these signs in vain; but our patience has been rewarded by the elucidation of facts which have led us to brighter conclusions than those so generally accepted.  We have not judged China as a nation from the inspection of a few low opium-shops, or from the half dozen extreme cases of which we may have been personally cognizant, or which we may have gleaned from the reports of medical missionaries in charge of hospitals for native patients.  We do not deny that opium is a curse, in so far as a large number of persons would be better off without it; but comparing its use as a stimulant with that of alcoholic liquors in the West, we are bound to admit that the comparison is very much to the disadvantage of the latter.  Where opium kills its hundreds, gin counts its victims by thousands; and the appalling scenes of drunkenness so common to a European city are of the rarest occurrence in China.  In a country where the power of corporal punishments is placed by law in the hands of the husband, wife-beating is unknown; and in a country where an ardent spirit can be supplied to the people at a low price, delirium tremens is an untranslateable term.  Who ever sees in China a tipsy man reeling about a crowded thoroughfare, or lying with his head in a ditch by the side of some country road?  The Chinese people are naturally sober, peaceful, and industrious; they fly from intoxicating, quarrelsome samshoo, to the more congenial opium-pipe, which soothes the weary brain, induces sleep, and invigorates the tired body.

In point of fact, we have failed to find but a tithe of that real vice which cuts short so many brilliant careers among men who, with all the advantages of education and refinement, are euphemistically spoken of as addicted to the habit of “lifting their little fingers.”  Few Chinamen seem really to love wine, and opium, by its very price, is beyond the reach of the blue-coated masses.  In some parts, especially in Formosa, a great quantity is smoked by the well-paid chair-coolies, to enable them to perform the prodigies of endurance so often required of them.  Two of these fellows will carry an ordinary Chinaman, with his box of clothes, thirty miles in from eight to ten hours on the hottest days in summer.  They travel between five and six miles an hour, and on coming to a stage, pass without a moment’s delay to the place where food and opium are awaiting their arrival.  After smoking their allowance and snatching as much rest as the traveller will permit, they start once more upon the road; and the occupant of the chair cannot fail to perceive the lightness and elasticity of their tread, as compared with the dull, tired gait of half an hour before.  They die early, of course; but we have trades in civilised England in which a man thirty-six years of age is pointed at as a patriarch.