When we follow the drug to China, we turn over a still darker page in its history. Sir Thomas Wade, the present English Minister to the Chinese government, says: "It is to me vain to think otherwise of the use of the drug in China than of a habit many more times pernicious, naturally speaking, than the whisky drinking which we deplore at home. I know no case of radical cure." Dr. S. W. Williams, formerly agent of the American Board of Foreign Missions, and subsequently Secretary to the United States Legation at Peking, writes: "Mr. Wade's experience of about thirty years is like mine of more than forty years' residence among the Chinese, during which time I have known only one case of thorough reformation from the habit." Mr. Majoribanks, President of the Select Committee of the East India Company, at Canton, says: "The misery and demoralization occasioned by opium are almost beyond belief." Consul Lay says: "It is hamstringing the nation." Mr. R. M. Martin, a gentleman of integrity and judgment, who resigned a lucrative position in the British service that he might come to England to support his words, says: "Every hour is bringing fresh victims to a Moloch who knows no satiety, where the English murderer and the Chinese suicide vie with each other in offering at his shrine." Dr. A. G. Reid, a physician in the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs Service, testifies concerning one hundred patients who had come to him during the previous year. He says: "In every instance the applicants came to me because they had lost their means of subsistence through the use of the drug. Their object in coming was merely to obtain a remedy to appease their present craving, and restore their strength so as to enable them to resume their duties and earn wages to be again expended in opium. . . . Opium differs from alcoholic indulgence by the absolute necessity of having a fixed quantity. A drunkard may abstain until means accumulate to enable him to purchase liquor; but the opium smoker must have his daily stimulant, or he breaks down. To obtain it, there is no sacrifice he will not stoop to: even his wife is readily lent out for prostitution to provide means to buy the drug." We have before us many other statements, equally pertinent and forcible, of the process of national deterioration going on in an empire which includes one-third of the human family.

The fact that foreigners force this poison upon the nation is the principal reason for their exclusion from the interior, and for the

jealous and almost hostile attitude of the authorities. It is somewhat to the credit of our nation that many of the Chinese think that all opium merchants are English, and all the missionaries Americans. There is a wide-spread opinion that the opium merchant comes to ruin their bodies, and that the English missionary is sent as an agent of his government to "buy the heart" of the people away from the Emperor; and when the Church is sufficiently strong in numbers, and the physique of the nation has been emasculated by opium, then the Church and the British government will coalesce, and the Celestials be subject to the barbarians. It is notorious, too, that commonly the first word uttered by a Chinaman, when urged to embrace Christianity, is to the effect—“Why do Christians bring us opium, they knowing as they do the misery resulting to us from it?" The bishop of Victoria (Hong Kong) lately said: "I have been again and again stopped while preaching, with the question, 'Are you an Englishman? Is not that the country that opium comes from? Go back and stop it, and then we will talk about Christianity."" We close this article (leaving further comment to our readers), by quoting words with which a Chinaman interrupted a missionary while preaching in Amoy"If your nation believes in these doctrines as divine, why has it imported this poisonous stuff to bring poverty, distress, and ruin throughout our land? There is no use in your trying to get out of the matter by saying that you have nothing to do with the opium, system: your country has. It is your nation that is responsible for all the ruin caused by opium. It was the English guns that compelled our Emperor to sanction the trade, and it is through England that it may be sold throughout the length and breadth of the land, without our government being able to do anything effectual to prevent its spread throughout the kingdom."

GEORGE C. JONES.

MR

FOX BOURNE'S LIFE OF LOCKE1

R. FOX BOURNE'S Life of Locke is the first systematic and satisfactory attempt to write the life of one of the greatest and most representative of Englishmen. The earlier biographies

1 THE LIFE OF JOHN LOCKE; by H. R. Fox Bourne. In two volumes. Pp. xvi. 488 and i. 574, 1oyal 8vo. New York: Harper & Brothers.

by Bp. Law and Lord King are merely amplificatious of the sketch
published by his contemporary Le Clerc in the Bibliotheque Choisie,
by way of an obituary notice; although the latter supplements it
with valuable documents, which Lord King has edited, as Carlyle
has it, "by hoisting the shafts." But Locke's last biographer has
spared no pains in collecting and elucidating the facts and the doc-
uments which belong to his subject. He has ransacked the public
archives, the family records of the Shaftesbury family, and above
all the Library of the Remonstrants at Rotterdam, where besides
many that were new, he found the means to restore letters already
published to their original form by reinserting those passages of
personal interest which previous editors thought not dignified
enough for publication. And while Mr. Fox Bourne is not a
writer of the first order, he yet possesses many excellencies of style
and manner.
As readers of his English Seamen under the Tudors,
his English Merchants, and his Memoir of Sir Philip Sidney, very
well know, he tells a story with a clearness of statement which
suffers nothing from his pains-taking accuracy. He can hardly be
called a brilliant writer, but he is an eminently readable and useful
biographer. He is not always possessed of the preliminary knowl-
edge necessary to enable him to form a just estimate of Locke's
position in the historical development of the sciences with which
he occupied himself; but what he does tell us is quite correct as
far as it goes, though at times somewhat inadequate. He at
times makes Locke a more heroic person than the facts indicate,
ascribing to him virtues which are part of the biographer's ideal
of manhood and patriotism, but in which his subject shared but
slightly.

Locke deserves a good biography. He lived through a period of great changes, and he contributed mightily to the working of those changes. He was born, as Mr. Fox Bourne well reminds. us, when the author of Paradise Lost was in his twenty-fourth year, and when he died the author of La Pucelle was seven years old. He interpreted his age to itself, stripping it of hear-says and traditions which had ceased to be convictions, and were becoming hollow hypocrisies and humbugs. He had all the best qualities of his age in an eminent degree, its sober common sense, its public spirit, its growing love of toleration, its dislike of scholastic notions and phrases which did not connect themselves with practical life, its attachment to liberty, its love of daylight unstained by

"storied windows." He shared largely in its limitations also, in its mere common sense, its lack of enthusiasm, imagination and passion, its immovable phlegm, its impatience of the higher forms of speculation, its severance of life from the unseen ground of existence, its utter want of "the historic sense," and its blindness to spiritual beauty whether in art or nature, in life or literature. The conflicts of the period of public opinion between 1688 and 1789, (the true eighteenth century), were fought more under the banner of Locke than of any other thinker. He furnished the premises assumed by both parties; his name was used both by those who appealed to his comparative orthodoxy, and by those who carried his principles to their legitimate conclusions. And although we have passed into a new era, and have re-opened all the old questions which he sought to close forever, his influence is still paramount with the half-educated public. He writes the editorials of our newspapers; he makes the speeches from our rostrums; he has a hand in half the sermons that we hear from the pulpits. And thinkers since the French Revolution may still be classed according to their loyalty to Locke or their revolt from him. Not that Locke has been the creator of that age. It would have been substantially the same if he had never lived, for he was but the spokesman who gave shape and utterance to the thoughts which were fermenting in the hearts of his contemporaries. He was the child of the Zeitgeist, its favorite child; he was not one of those grander spirits whose mission it is to overcome their times, and whose lives seem fruitless until they have fallen, like the seed grain, to die and yet to bring forth much fruit.

Locke was, of course, a many-sided man, or else he could not have sustained this relation to an age of many-sided interest. He was an educator, both in theory and in practice. He was a physician of some distinction, though not of wide activity, and was associated with Sydenham in the reform of medical practice. He was a theologian after his fashion, having long hesitated between the church and medicine as a profession; and much of his time and of his writings were taken up with this subject. He was also, after his fashion, a philosopher, and the inventor of a philosophic method, or at least its reviver after long disuse. He was a traveler, having spent years on the continent, both before and during his exile, and having left us some very graphic letters descriptive of France, Germany and Holland. He was an economist of the old

Mercantile School, which the disciples of Adam Smith have so grossly and unfairly decried. He was a practical and a theoretical politician; he served when quite young in the diplomatic corps; after the Revolution, he took office under King William, and was put forward as the literary champion of the Revolution and of that policy of toleration, which was then adopted. Few of the great themes which were freely discussed in England, and were soon to be discussed with equal freedom in France and wherever French culture could penetrate, failed to receive his attention, and all were treated in such fashion that he excited men's rapture by giving them back their own thoughts in the most suitable forms.

Born in 1632 at Pensford, near Bristol, John Locke was the son of one of that Parliamentary minority who for a time made headway in the west against the Royalists, but were wrecked by the defeat at Devizes. His father was a captain in the Parliamentary forces, and lost most of his estate by the mishaps of the war. It was owing to the influence of a relative that young John was entered in 1646 as a student at Westminster School, where the renowned Dr. Busby, who had been appointed before the civil war, ruled with unbroken sway through Commonwealth times, and that of the three kings who followed the Restoration. Probably no other public institution experienced so little of the mutations of that time of change, possessing as it did a sovereign whose will was law, and who never allowed his pupils to think that the kingdom contained any one of greater dignity than his own. In 1652 Locke entered Christ College, Oxford, then experiencing, under Dr. John Owen, that Puritan administration, which, as Clarendon reluctantly admits, did more for learning, as well as discipline, than any that preceded or followed it. He graduated as Bachelor in 1656, and as Master in 1658, but continued to reside as a student of Christ Church, studying and teaching as opportunity offered. This sort of residence was only allowed to those who had decided on the study of divinity, and for several years Locke hesitated between that and medicine. His expulsion from the University in 1684, at the request of the king, though arbitrary and discreditable to the authorities, had therefore the less of hardship, as it was done by canceling a special favor which had been extended to Locke, who was suspected of having written a very offensive Whig pamphlet. It seems probable from the recently published correspondence of Dr. Humphrey Prideaux, that that worthy had been acting as a spy upon Locke's movements.