Woodruff County news., 1909-02-25

no IrlendS.
 Therefore, when the statesmen of the earth reached the tardy conclusion that the encouragement of opium smoking really did not pay, the gaunt glant of the poppy fields was ready to be boWled over, writes Allan L. Ben son. At this propitious moment the United States government, which had never sought to fatten on the opium traffic, initiated a worldwide fight against it.
 That was two years ago. China, which for 700 years had alternately fought against and wrung revenue from it's greatest national weakness, rallied for another attack.
 First an edict went forth that every Chinese official who smoked opium must forthwith cease to do so.
 Then the common people of China were notified that they, too, must soon stop. The common people, however, were given ten years in which to taper off the habit to the vanishing point.
 China also entered into an agree ment with Great Britain to decrease. year by year, the area devoted to poppy culture in China and in India.
 Of course one does not need to go far to find the reason for Americas opposition to the opium-smoking habit AS people, we do not burn the poppy's blood, and are not greedy enough to care to continue to collect the $6 a toy 1o+ opium that the Chinese and the white degenerates want to smoke But how comes it that England, which once fought for opium with her armies and her fleets is now openly against it? And how comes it that China, whose public officials have so long fattened on the taxes wrung from the traffic, is sitting beside England? Back of these circumstances is profound economic fact.
 This fact is that opium smoking does not pay. It never paid-but shorter sighted governmental officials long thought it did. Yet the changed view has not it's origin in the failure of tariffs and imposts of various sorts to wiring enormous sums from those who smoke the Oriental pipe. Here is the real story in three sentences:
 Men, to pay taxes, must first be born.
 After birth they must have strength and industry.
 And they must not die until they are too old to work.
 Now see what opium does:
 In those families where the father smokes opium the average number of children is 1.09. The few children who are born and who reach maturity are poor workers, and they die young
 Here is the world crying for eff f1ciency and prodigious production. Here are the great nations scanning their budgets and their industries in desperate desire to raise the enormous sums with which to maintain their armies, increase their navies and carry on their other great governmental ac- tivities. And here is opium palsying the hands that could turn many wheel.
 Is it any wonder that the poppy fields are giving way to rice, and that the American congress has passed a bill excluding smoking-opium? The statesmen of an older school, it is true, would have done otherwise. They would have clutched the penny-tax and lost the ultimate dollar. But even England is no longer so unwise. Eng land knows that her DreadnoughtS were not launched from poppy fields; that they were made possible only by the well-worked mines and mills and farms of England And while she is aware that she could continue to reap a pittance from the poppies, she is now seeking bigger things. She wants to tax the greater products of vigor- ous men.
 Yet what fight it has been for China to see this happy day when the worlds interest in this matter has be- come like her own! It's a fight that began TOO years ago. and it Illustrates, as nothing else can, the peculiar strength and the peculiar weakness that dTS luH6ISUl III lH6 6UlD6Se CQdT- acter. It also affords one of the few illustrations of the superiority of au- tocratic government over popular rule For while the people of the opium habit, always vigorously fought for it, even as they are now rioting against the curtailment of the poppy fields, the government has always opposed it, precisely as it opposes it to-day. Some times 1t has yielded to exterior force, and then it has shown its weakness by impoverishing with taxes those whose bodies opium was impoverish- ing
 Opium was unknown in China until the latter part of the twelfth century Who brought it there perhaps does not make so much difference, since it is there, but the British say the Arabs did. At any rate, the dried juice of the poppy came from some of the eastern Europeans or western Asiatic