Directory_and_Chronicle_1841 — Page 529

512

Six Months with the China Expedition.

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of our readers may remember an instance of this, which happened on the 12th of December, 1838, at Canton, when a mob of some ten thousand of the black-haired race had driven the fankwei into their factories, and would have soon driven them out again, but for the timely interference of the police. In the case cited by lord Jocelyn, the people took a stand against the government, and refused to let its agents enter their houses to search for opium, until the people them- selves had first searched the said agents. And we remember many similar instances, in which the people en masse have resisted success- fully the will of their rulers. As for Taoukwang's life, it is in no more jeopardy from his people, than is that of the king of the French, or that of queen Victoria, from their "loving subjects."

Again, when his lordship tells his readers that the opium-trade did not occupy the attention of government until 1820, he is out of his reckoning by at least twenty years. All he says about the injurious effects of the drug is quite true. When at Singapore,

"I had the curiosity to visit the opium-smoker in his heaven; and certainly it is a most fearful sight, although perhaps not so de- grading to the eye as the drunkard from spirits, lowered to the level of the brute, and wallowing in his filth. The idiotic smile and death- like stupor, however, of the opium debauchee has something far more awful to the gaze than the bestiality of the latter. Pity, if possible, takes the place of other feelings, as we watch the faded cheek and haggard look of the being abandoned to the power of the drug; whilst disgust is uppermost at the sight of the human creature leveled to the beast by intoxication.

"One of the streets in the centre of the town is wholly devoted to the shops for the sale of this poison; and here in the evening may be seen, after the labors of the day are over, crowds of Chinese, who seek these places to satisfy their depraved appetites.

"Some entering half distracted to feed the craving appetite they had been obliged to subdue during the day; others laughing and talking wildly under the effects of a first pipe; whilst the couches around are filled with their different occupants, who lie languid with an idiotic smile upon their countenance, too much under the influence of the drug to care for passing events, and fast merging to the wished- for consummation: The last scene in this tragic play is generally a room in the rear of the building, a species of death-house, where lie stretched those who have passed into the state of bliss the opium- smoker madly seeks-an emblem of the long sleep to which he is blindly hurrying.”

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