THE
A
UNITED
m e r i c a n
A MAGAZINE OF GOOD CITIZENSHIP
Devoted to the Cause of
Americanization, Assimilation and Group Elimination; Pointing the way to a Constitutional
Americanism, to Equality in Citizenship, and a better understanding
between Native born and Foreign bom.
Vol Q
v Ul. O
Continuous O1
Volume
J-
August, 1925
Number 11
A GIANT PLEADING FOR JUSTICE
THE STRANGE WORKINGS OF THE LAW OF RETRIBUTION
By H. J. LANGOE
,T' HE CURRENT political upheavals in China are
furnishing many strange sidelights and while
there may not* be any sequential order in the drama
enacted, scene after scene, there are traces of a conse
quential and orderly functioning of a law no man ever
wrote, over which no mortal has any control, mandates
against which the injunction servers are powerless.
The outrages perpetrated by the Chinese bandits
and soldiers against the English girl missionaries in
China are deplorable. The beatings and other abuses
administered to them by the hordes of villains are
reprehensible and the victims are indeed to be pittied
for the cruel fate that has led them into this cataclysm
while on their errand of mercy, charity and good will
out in the world. But, though these girls may not
know much about it, broad humanitarians may little
blame the Chinese for being rather suspicious of the
kind of “salvation” offered them by England, in view
of the thorough knowledge the Chinese possess of what
havoc there has been created in China through the
“commercial benefits” England brought them when it
brought them OPIUM.
No curse has ever been visited upon a people with
such telling effects as the curse of opium upon the
Chinese. Even the flower of youth faded in China
after opium began to still the senses of the Chinaman
and made him a victim of his own folly—a craven, a
spineless fool, content with his opium and his pipe,
his lamp and his utensils, his cot and his ill smelling
hovel.
Generation after generation of will-less, senile men,
decrepit in youth, due to poisoned senses, have passed
in China, the land victimized by opium—a source of
large revenue for a pretentious civilized nation. The
poison has actually gone into the blood of the Chinese
and, if opium was barred from China, it would take
at least another generation before the purification of
the blood in China could be accomplished to an extent
permitting the development of a natural vitality, cap
able of throwing off the shackles of a habit, a desease,
so frightful as the addiction to narcotics, that has been
visited upon China, a land so fertile and of such pro
fuse vegetation that it has been given the name “The
Flowery Land”—a reference to China now applied as a
term indicating ridicule.
A narcosis victim in America is sufficient to stir
a community into action to help in delivering the addict
from his afflictions, if that be possible, as for instance
in the earliest stages of addiction. The comparison
should help us visualize the picture of a NATION
suffering in the advanced stages of narcosis; stagger
ing, reeling, mind and body benumbed, deprived of
clear consciousness, narcotized to the marrow of its
very bones.
Such is the present mental and physical picture
we have of China, a country comprising almost a
square, with an area of 1,537,590 square miles in the
so-called table lands of Central Asia. Including its
broad states of Manchuria, Mongolia, Jungaria, East
Turkestan, and Tibet, China covers an estimated area
of 4,218,400 square miles. The inhabitants of neutral
China, including its eighteen provinces (Shih-pa-
Shang), numbered 386,000,000, in 1900, while that of
the whole country, including the dependencies, in 1903
was estimated to be 426,447,000.
Into this vast area, to every nook and cranny, the
nerve-raking, blood-curdling, morality devouring
opium—produced from a plant that is native of India
and in some parts of Egypt, finds its way under con
ditions that are too well inscribed in the records of
history to permit of concealment. Here is an Ameri
can Encyclopedia reference to the “opium traffic” that
is just as full of “understanding” as the proverbial
apple Eve picked, only that we can understand much
more by reading between the lines:
Opium traffic, in China, India, Turkey, and other parts of
the East, and, to a small extent in the West, opium is used
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