The Opium Conference has been resumed at Geneva, and the
British GoVernment have shown their sense of its importance by sending a Cabinet Minister, Lord Cecil. The opium problem is an extraordinarily difficult one, and it would be lamentable if the United 'States and Great Britain quarrelled about it or reached a deadlock. Although America and Great Britain both want the same thing a very wide gulf still yawns between our ideas as to how the end should be attained. Lord Cecil has proposed that Great Britain should cause opium-smoking to cease in all her Far Eastern possessions within fifteen years from the date on which the measures for suppressing opium-growing in China shall be effective. 'Mr. Stephen Porter and his colleagues on behalf of America will have nothing to say to such a policy. They declare that the British policy of suppression should be immediate and that within ten years, or at the outside fifteen years, no opium should be sold except what is required for medical purposes. " Opium," exclaimed Mr. Porter, " is a form of slavery. It ought to be suppressed as the United States suppressed human slavery."
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