THE OPIUM TUADK. 173 



to ten, a few young girls, and the remainder women, 

 varying from thirty to fifty years of age all miserable 

 and squalid and perhaps there might be one or two 

 males. In other villages again, there are more inhabit- 

 ants and new houses added, but it is owing to the rem- 

 nants of other villages resorting there from the ruins of 

 their own, and the advance of the forest. This is the 

 condition to which opium reduces a country, and, as in the 

 valley of Assam, so it is in the Tartar country to nearly an 

 equal degree of desolation. Such has been the result of 

 the use of opium as witnessed by myself. I will now 

 give the experience of parties interested in the trade or 

 otherwise. 



Mr. Martin, one of her Majesty's treasurers in China, 

 represents the use of opium as follows : " The continued 

 action of opium as a sensual stimulant tends rapidly to 

 the wasting of youth, health, strength, and beauty ; 

 those who begin its use at twenty may expect to die at 

 thirty years of age. The countenance becomes pallid ; 

 the eyes assume a wild brightness, and memory fails, the 

 gait totters, mental exertions and moral courage sink, 

 and frightful marasmus or atrophy reduces the victim to 

 a ghastly spectacle, who has ceased to live before he has 

 ceased to exist." 



W. Hamilton Lindsay, Esq. M. P., says : " As it IP, 

 nothing can be more injurious to the British character 

 than the mode in which the opium trade is at present 

 conducted. It is now real smuggling accompanied by all 

 its worst features of violence." 



Captain Elliott, late her Majesty's superintendent in 

 China, says : " It is intensely mischievous to every 

 branch of the trade ; that it is rapidly staining the 

 British character with deep disgrace." 



