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removals from a bonded warehouse as would bring the price to the consumer to about what he now pays to the farmer. The answer is that the Chinese are extraordinarily adroit smugglers, that opium is valuable enough to be worth smuggling in very small quantities and therefore a very easy article to smuggle, and that the circumstances of Hongkong, including the number of local junks and other small craft, afford exceptional facilities for smuggling. True, the farmer has to contend with all these difficulties, but where he succeeds the Government would infallibly fail. The farmer is a Chinaman and he interests his relations and dependents by giving them a share in the profits of the farm, and he thus commands a preventive force incomparably more effective.
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