It is also commonly stated that a man who has once begun opium can never leave it off.  This is an entire fallacy.  There is a certain point up to which a smoker may go with impunity, and beyond which he becomes a lost man in so far as he is unable ever to give up the practice.  Chinamen ask if an opium-smoker has the yin or not; meaning thereby, has he gradually increased his doses of opium until he has established a craving for the drug, or is he still a free man to give it up without endangering his health.  Hundreds and thousands stop short of the yin; a few, leaving it far behind them in their suicidal career, hurry on to premature old age and death.  Further, from one point of view, opium-smoking is a more self-regarding vice than drunkenness, which entails gout and other evils upon the third and fourth generation.  Posterity can suffer little or nothing at the hands of the opium-smoker, for to the inveterate smoker all chance of posterity is denied.  This very important result will always act as an efficient check upon an inordinately extensive use of the drug in China, where children are regarded as the greatest treasures life has to give, and blessed is he that has his quiver full.

Indulgence in opium is, moreover, supposed to blunt the moral feelings of those who indulge; and to a certain extent this is true.  If your servant smokes opium, dismiss him with as little compunction as you would a drunken coachman; for he can no longer be trusted.  His wages being probably insufficient to supply him with his pipe and leave a balance for family expenses, he will be driven to squeeze more than usual, and probably to steal.  But to get rid of a writer or a clerk merely because he is a smoker, however moderate, would be much the same as dismissing an employe for the heinous offence of drinking two glasses of beer and a glass of sherry at his dinner-time.  An opium-smoker may be a man of exemplary habits, never even fuddled, still less stupefied.  He may take his pipe because he likes it, or because it agrees with him; but it does not follow that he must necessarily make himself, even for the time being, incapable of doing business.  Wine and moonlight were formerly considered indispensables by Chinese bards; without them, no inspiration, no poetic fire.  The modern poetaster who pens a chaste ode to his mistress’s eyebrow, seeks in the opium-pipe that flow of burning thoughts which his forefathers drained from the wine-cup.  We cannot see that he does wrong.  We believe firmly that a moderate use of the drug is attended with no dangerous results; and that moderation in all kinds of eating, drinking, and smoking, is just as common a virtue in China as in England or anywhere else.[*]