The Times and its correspondent in China have done good
service by publishing last Saturday a plain spoken article on Opium and China. Those who have lived in China lately may smile that we should need to have our eyes thus opened. They know it all, and more. Europe has heard, though perhaps hardly taken in, that the League of Nations' Commission of Inquiry, after visiting Singapore, Hongkong and other places in the East outside China, has been turned back, and will not make its tour into the country by far the most important for its purpose. The enforcement of the Chinese Laws against the cultivation of the poppy takes the form of punishing the peasants who grow too little and grow grain for their families instead. The elaborate laws fOr prevention and control of manufacture and trade in opium are enforced with great vigour, even with assassination, against the Chinese " free traders " who are not in the " ring " which works with all the civil and military authorities, who could not exist without this profitable source of revenue. The regular traders have gun-boats and military guards at their disposal, as may be seen any day upon the Yangtze. Such things make it the more fantastic that a Chinaman at Geneva, nominally representing the Government of all China at Nanking, should claim a seat on the Council of the League.
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