Ilf 1 . t*^****"^ i OLAV^ THE POPPY HARVEST, A STUDY IN ANGLO-INDIAN ETHICS. “It is the price of blood .” Matt, xxvii. 6. TWELVE ILLUSTRATIONS; FACSIMILES OF NATIVE CARTOONS. BY THE REV. T. G. SELBY, Twelve years a Missionary in South China. Published for the Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade, Broadway Chambers, Westminster, S.W., By P. S. King Son, 5, King Street, Westminster. hull : BRUMBY AND CLARKE, PRINTERS AND PUBLISHERS, PROSPECT STREET. 11 . EXPLANATION OF THE ILLUSTRATIONS, The illustrations which accompany this pamphlet are, with the exception of the colouring, entirely Chinese. It is perhaps needless to say that the design, perspective, anatomy, and atmos- phere of the pictures are not European. The original cartoons are printed from wood blocks, and circulated in every part of the Chinese Empire. They are distributed by the non-christian sections of the population, so cannot be charged with echoing the opinions of the missionaries. They may be accepted as accurate- ly reflecting the common judgment of the Chinese themselves with regard to the effeCt of opium-smoking upon those who indulge in it. The knowledge expressed in these rude cartoons is first-hand, and perfectly trustworthy. It amply justifies us in challenging the assertion made by Indian officials, whose knowledge is, at best, only second-hand, that the drug is as harmless as beer or wine. I.— THE FIRST DOWNWARD STEP. The opium smoker is seen making his first experiment in the vice, in a tasteful summer-house, surrounded by gardens and rockeries. He reclines on a couch of Chinese ebony, inlaid with marble, and all his surroundings are elegant and luxurious. His companion has in his hand one of the brass “hubble-bubbles’' common throughout China, and is smoking tobacco. II.— PARENTAL EXPOSTULATIONS. The opium smoker, who has been detected in his secret debaucheries, is now seen kneeling before his indignant father asking forgiveness, and promising amendment in the future. The aged mother leans on a staff in the adjoining room. III.— PLEASURE GOES; SORROW COMES. The habit, once formed, is not easily conquered, and the vice is now resumed. One dissipation leads to another, and the lewd musician appears also upon the scene. 111 . IV.— HABIT FIXED; REPUTATION RUINED. In the best known series of Chinese cartoons, this sketch represents the sale of the family patrimony. The original of the present engraving, however, shows the wife painting scrolls for a livelihood. V.— DEAF TO ENTREATY. Wife and child are now seen weeping at the side of the couch. The fortunes of the family have been brought so low, that the aged mother has to do the work of the servant, and bring the smoker his pot of tea. VI.— RESENTMENT SHOWN. The wife in her hopeless rage dashes the opium utensils to the ground, and prepares to split up the pipe. Her debauched husband, incensed by this interference with his pleasures, seizes a stick to beat her, but is restrained by some friend or attendant. VII.—' THE OPIUM APPETITE KEENER THAN THAT FOR FOOD. Some old acquaintance offers him refreshment in his desolation. He has lost, however, all relish for ordinary food. VIII.—" WEEPING OF WIFE & CHILD. Wife and child look with hopeless sorrow and repugnance upon one who was once a portly and w r ell dressed gentleman. IX.— THE EMPTY HOUSE. The comfort and shelter of the ancestral home are things of the past. His present refuge is an ill roofed hovel, and his kitchen a makeshift arrangement of mats. Every stick of furni- ture is gone, and he has to smoke on the floor. X.— SELF-INDUCED WRETCHEDNESS. The tyrannous need for opium drives to crime. Possibly the bucket in which the outcast carries his pipe, and the rain-hat slung behind him, are both stolen. The village dogs recognise him for a tramp and a loafer, and drive him from human habitations. The lee-side of a rock, or some cave in the hill, must shelter him from the cutting wind. IV. XI. — HOMELESSNESS, The downward course of the smoker is now rapid. Exposure to the weather and want of food accelerate the effects of the opium, and the end is not far off. His opium pipe and lamp are still by his side. XII.— THE END. Winter is already here. With trembling steps and a huddled-up frame, he seeks the shelter of a cave amongst the rocks in which he will lie down and die — a type of tens of thousands of victims. BRUMBY A CLARKE. LITH.. HULL Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2017 with funding from Columbia University Libraries https://archive.org/details/poppyharvestOOselb > VI ynr I X - XU THE POPPY HARVEST. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY. A VISIT TO BENARES. After eight years sojourn as a missionary in China, it was my privilege to pay a hying visit to Northern India. In the course •of that visit I spent a couple of days in Benares, the home and vital head of modern Hinduism, a city of sacred wells, gilded domes, picturesque pilgrims, and every variety of Oriental spangle. On the afternoon of one of those days I drove out to Sarnath. The ruins for which this spot is famous, though wanting in the splendour which distinguishes many of the historic sights of our Indian empire, were invested with an overwhelming interest and fascination, at least for my own mind. Near one of the two towers once stood a banyan tree under which Buddha preached his first sermon. That sermon affected most profoundly the religious destiny of the country from which I had just come, and sympathy with whose dense millions was still fresh in my heart. For more than eighteen centuries China has been under the spell of the great prince of Northern India who forsook marble palace and wooded park, and rank and throne and empire, to become teacher, example, and benefactor of his kind. Not far from the newly opened trenches in which there lie the massive foundations of a Monastery, Buddha gathered together his first disciples and bound them into an ascetic brotherhood. In every province and prefect- ure of the Chinese empire, Buddhist brotherhoods exist of the type initiated upon this particular spot, and the priests of these brother- hoods are found saying masses in every Chinese home on the appointed days of mourning for the dead. Probably every man of China’s three hundred and sixty millions feels the effect of that discourse to-day, for the Chinaman is hard to discover in whom there is not some streak of Buddhist faith and philosophy. THE INFLUENCE OF BUDDHA. China, in the judgment of some, has been the better for the presence of Buddhism in its midst. The system has helped to make China idolatrous but it has kept it from the irreligion to which it was drifting under the influence of Confucius and his agnostic successors. It is a suggestive sign of the influence of Buddhism upon the language and religious thought of China that Christian missionaries have taken some of their theological terms from the phraseology Buddhism has created. The tidal 2 The Poppy Harvest : wave of influence that started out from this place and in the end touched Burma. Thibet, Mongolia, China, Corea, and Japan, up to the present time is quite unparalleled. THE POPPY PLANT. Beyond these gaping trenches of ruin there lay fertile fields fluttering with white blossom. Right away to the horizon they stretched with scarcely an object to interrupt'the view, and miles beyond. Here and there the solemn, silent, solitary ryot glided ghost-like amongst the hedgeless, wide-expanding fields. These fields, no less than the heaps of inarticulate ruin and towers of sun-burnt masonry that could tell such a wonderful history if their dumbness could be dispelled, have a vital relation to the destinies of the three hundred and sixty millions of yellow skins north-east of the snow-capped Himalayas. The white blossom that flutters in those fields is that of the poppy plant from which opium is derived. From the great wall on the north, which once shut out the Tartars, to the gulf of Tonquin on the south, there is not a Chinese home that has not felt the influence of this colossal industry. Each year’s crop at the lowest computation costs China hundreds of thousands of lives, and it is difficult to resist the impression that these white blossoms are after all but stuff for funeral wreaths, for the juice whose secretion is screened behind these delicate petals will destroy more Chinamen than our largest city cemeteries could find grave-room for. THE INFLUENCE OF OPIUM. As I stood there my heart was moved ; for one escapes the trammels of the little centuries in such scenes. I could not help wondering upon which wave of influence, the ancient or modern, will the verdict of the after generations put its approval ? When the Judge of the black and white and yellow man gathers into his presence all nations, upon whom will He pass the gentler sentence ? Upon this teacher of Northern India, who, when he came forth from his palace and saw that humanity was weltering in pain, found no pleasure in princely rank, and sacrificed all things to be the helper and servant of a stricken world, and who through eighteen centuries has been softening by his influence the harsh- ness of Chinese scepticism, who has touched China, if not to bless it, at least to save it from any lower fall into godlessness and irreligion ; or upon the Christian Government that plants these tracts of fertile land with the poppy, has made a market by shell, grapnel, sword, and bayonet for the insinuating drug, and touches the venerable Chinese empire only to bring the curse of debauch- ery into its cities and the blight of death into its homes ? Which is nobler, the spirit which was the mainspring of the Buddhist Creed, which gave up all for others, or the spirit of Anglo-Indian officalism, which asserts that, whatever the cost to China, Indian finance, or in plain words the luxuries of our exotic Government and the palatial homes of the white-faced rulers of India, must be maintained. A Study in Anglo-Indian Ethics. 3 The most natural way of treating the subject will be to start with the cultivation of opium in India, then pass with some ship- ment to China and watch its distribution there, and touch in the last place upon the political questions involved in this most melancholy subject. CHAPTER II. THE CULTIVATION OF OPIUM IN INDIA. In touching on this first part of the subject I do not claim to be an expert or a skilled witness. I make use of information that is perfectly trustworthy and in one form or another is already before the public. A GOVERNMENT MONOPOLY. The sheets of white poppy we see in the fields around us have been planted under the direction and with the capital of the Anglo-Indian Government. Every year the ruling authorities determine what amount of land shall be placed under cultivation. Half a million acres is the average area given up to the growth of the poppy. The cultivation was, in former times, often forced upon unwilling ryots by government officials. An advance of money is offered to the ryot and he is told what amount of land he will have to lay under cultivation. A second advance of money is made when the crop is nearly ripe, and the balance is paid when the crude drug is delivered to the Government factories in which it is prepared and packed for Calcutta and subsequent export to China. When the poppy has attained its full size but is still green the peasant passes through the fields and gashes each head with a four-bladed knife. The next morning he goes round with an iron spoon and collects the gum that has exuded. He then gashes the head a second time and the juice or gum which exudes after this further operation makes an inferior quality of opium. The raw opium from these country districts is then placed in earthen- ware jars and sent to the Government factories. Here the contents of the different jars are put together in mixing vats and stirred or kneaded into a homogeneous mass. From the mixing rooms it is carried into a department in which it is made up into balls of precisely the same weight, half way in size between a cricket and a foot-ball. The balls are stored for a time in racks in a drying room, and then sent down for sale by Government auction in Calcutta. THE OPIUM SALES AT CALCUTTA. This bi-monthly auction, at which I was present some years ago, is attended by a curious crowd of Parsees, Mahommedans, Hindoos, and Anglicised Jews whose forefathers came to India by way of Bagdad. The auction combines with some of the excite- ment of Monte Carlo the additional attractions of an ethno- graphical museum. Barring the shipment of the drug to Hongkong, 4 The Poppy Harvest : the trade at this point has almost entirely passed out of British hands. After this sale the direct proprietorship of our Government in the drug ceases, but, as we shall see by and bye, political pressure is still used at Peking to facilitate the after career and ever-growing consumption of the drug. Passing now into the hands of the Calcutta merchants, the opium is carried through the Malacca Straits to Hongkong and Shanghai, from which great centres it is distributed to the different Treaty Ports, and thence by junk and sampan, cart and coolie, it finds its way to all the most important parts of the empire. THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT DIRECTLY RESPONSIBLE. The one fact I want to stand out in this description is that from the beginning to the end of the growth and preparation of opium the British Government is the prime responsible and only actor. The ryot, or Government tenant, is the mere instrument of the administration, and does not get a sufficient share of the spoil to make him particularly zealous for this special appropriation of his land and labour. He often cultivates unwillingly. I should be sorry to see the cultivation of opium perpetuated under a modified arrangement in which the ryot would be the prime adventurer in the transaction and the Indian Government the taxing authority only, but the present system is just as blunt and candid and straightforward in its badness as possible. It is not as consenting parties only that the Viceroy and his advisers and subordinates pose. It is perhaps as well for a Government as for a man, if it must be wicked at all, to be so with a sharp, unmistakable, brazen-browed cynicism of undisguised wickedness. CHAPTER III. THE DISTRIBUTION AND USE OF OPIUM IN CHINA. As soon as these shipments of opium have reached Hongkong and Shanghai they are broken up and pass in the ordinary course of trade into the hands of retail dealers. The balls are stripped of the dried leaves in which they have been packed, torn like paste dumplings into fragments, put into an iron pan filled with clear mountain water, if it is accessible, and boiled over a slow fire. Various kinds of opium are mixed with each other in this process, and some shops acquire quite a reputation for their ingenious and tasteful blends. The proportion of these blends they of course profess to keep a secret. After the opium has been boiled to about the consistency of coal-tar or molasses, it is put into jars and sold for daily consump- tion in quantities ranging from the fiftieth part of an ounce to four or five ounces. I am sorry to say that the Colonial Governments of Hongkong and Singapore, not content with the revenue drawn from this article by the Anglo-Indian Government, have made opium-boiling a monopoly of the Crown, and a large slice of the A Study in Anglo-Indian Ethics. 5 revenue of these two Eastern Dependencies is secured by selling the exclusive right to farm this industry to the highest bidder. The purchaser of this Crown prerogative has to give adequate security for his financial trustworthiness. OPIUM SELLING IN CHINA. Morning and evening the retail opium shops are thronged by the ragged opium-smokers or their tatterdemalion children. In some poor districts the little dab or smear of the drug is carried away on a bamboo leaf. I mention this to show that we do not only take our money out of the rich who can afford luxuries. In the towns the smoker is generally the possessor of a little circular horn or jade case in which he stores his daily supply of the drug. The drug is then carried off to the inn or shop or boat where the smoker may happen to be staying. Sometimes it is smoked in a divan which the victim frequents, the counterpart of the dram and beer and wine shop of Europe. HOW OPIUM IS SMOKED. For the practice of his indulgence the smoker generally lays himself down on his side with head supported by a pillow made of rattan, leather, or earthenware. On the straw mat beside him, between his doubled-up knees and his nose, a small glass oil-lamp covered with a glass shade is burning. Near to the oil-lamp is a tray containing a little round box in which the precious drug is stored, a piece of wire like a knitting needle used in taking up the viscous stuff and manipulating it, a knife to scrape up the costly fragments that may adhere to the box or pipe, and the indispensable pipe itself. The latter article is two feet long, with a bore of about half an inch in diameter. It is not unlike the stem of a flute before the finger holes have been cut and the keys fitted on. At about a couple of inches from the bottom of the tube there is inserted a closed cup of earthenware or composition or stone, shaped like the rose of a watering can, with just one central perforation in place of a crowd of them. The smoker, having settled down to his indulgence, picks up a little pea or pellet of the drug with his knitting needle, and begins to knead or roll it pastry- cook fashion upon the closed surface of the cup. He then frizzles it at the lamp for a second, and lets it swell into a big blister. This he breaks up and rolls again, and then, after a long and tedious process of this sort, he puts the cooked and duly manipu- lated drug into the little aperture in the surface of the bowl, takes two or three whiffs whilst he holds it in the flame of the lamp, draws the fruity-smelling smoke into the lungs and then goes through the same round of performances again with a new morsel. The process is as tedious and painstaking a form of voluptuous indulgence as can be found, and if the consumption of wine, beer and whisky needed the same protracted manipulation we could cure drunkenness without the help of Temperance Pledge Books and Local Option. I have known rich men, hopelessly demoralised 6 The Poppy Harvest; by the drug, who have had servants standing by their couch most of the day getting ready their pipes. RIVER SIGHTS. Many scenes come back to my recollection, in which I have had the opportunity of witnessing the practice of this vice and conversing with its victims. My observations, I must premise, relate chiefly to the Canton Province. The tourist or the missionary perhaps first comes into direct contact with the habit on one of the broad-beamed paddle boats plying between Hongkong and Canton. These boats carry three or four hundred Chinese passengers daily, many of whom beguile the six hours of the passage by stretching themselves on mats and quilts and plying the little armoury of implements already described. Here and there we may pick out an opium skeleton or two, but our general impression may possibly be one of surprise that so many of the smokers seem to be healthy and well-nourished men. It has to be remembered, however, that the mid-deck passengers belong for the most part to well-to-do native traders and lower grade man- darins and their retainers. Of course rich food and active habits will help to ward off for a time the worst consequences of opium smoking. If we take a glance into one of the squalid dens that cluster round the steamer landing, our first impression will soon be corrected. These dens are dark, dingy, festooned with cobwebs, and have little light but what enters by the street-door or steals down a trap door from the roof of a rickety loft. By the little reflections of light from the opium lamps on those narrow beds there we can just trace the poky forms of chair bearers or cargo coolies, as closely packed as the inmates of a night refuge. The backs are quite serpentine in form, the complexions a meerschaum- pipe yellow, and shiny with what the Chinese call the opium oil. I do not know whether there is an actual exudation from the skin, but the face does become strangely unctuous, and the Chinese themselves look upon this characteristic as an unmistakable proof of opium habit. The eyes glitter with a feverish brightness, and the smokers speak to each other in snivelling undertones often broken by a cough. Incipient imbecility betrays itself in the half-opened mouth. After a time the nasal murmur dies away and some of the smokers drop off into a short sleep. The scene is like a half-dumb carnival of mummies worked with strings. HAUNTS OF THE VICE. Leaving this place, we go into a luxurious restaurant, where, after satisfying our own lawful requirements in the way of food, we can watch the Chinese visitors. Chairs and round tables and tea-poys made of ebony are inlaid with marble or mother-of- pearl. Lamps of painted glass are hung from the ceiling at different parts of the central hall. All the fittings are aesthetic, with the exception of a gorgeous, lustre-bedizened European chandelier which occupies the central position. Divided off from the main hall by elaborately carved and gilded screens and doors, A Study in Anglo-Indian Ethics. 7 are tiers of little rooms or boxes in which opium is being smoked. The boxes are fitted up with couches on which silver-mounted pipes and jewelled knick-knacks are placed. Here the Canton merchant will loll and imbibe his Patna or Benares, after first fortifying his constitution with rich and tenderly cooked repasts, and copious libations of “ samshoo.” In the offices of the mandarins, smoking is almost universal. We shall not be likely to see the undress life of any of these temples of law and equity, and shall have to accept the fact upon the testimony of clerks and impecunious scholars, who talk with- out any reserve of the various incidents of yamen life. We may possibly get an introduction to the proprietor of some private grounds in city suburbs or outskirts. Here we shall find the retired mandarin, or the merchant who has given the con- trol of his business into the hands of his sons and nephews, reclining in a quaint summer house or observatory placed amidst rockeries and fish ponds and Dutch landscape gardening, and smoking for large portions of the day. He perhaps tells you that he regrets the habit, but it is not doing him the harm it does to many. ON BOARD A NATIVE BOAT. The opportunity for a journey into the interior presents itself. We want to see Chinese life, so instead of hiring our own boat we take passage in an ordinary native boat, where we shall have for company a score or a hundred Chinamen. Amongst these there will be a large per centage of smokers. The monotony of a journey against adverse winds and currents may tempt some of them to drink more deeply into this evil fascination than in the past. As soon as the evening rice has been eaten, the thick blue mosquito nets will be rigged up for the night, but we shall soon perceive that the men who have crept inside them have not gone there to sleep but to smoke themselves to stupor by a process that may take three or four hours. In the morning, rice is no sooner eaten, and beds spread on the boat-boards cleared away, than we shall find these same people looping up their curtains again. This is not done because mosquitoes are in the air, for mosquitoes, like the employes on the morning newspapers, generally sleep during the day. The curtains are fixed to keep the wind from blowing out the lamps of these opium smokers. For a week or two we may be in the company of these men, alternately sickened by the fumes they give forth, and moved to pity by their plantive requests for European medicines to help them against the des- tructive and costly vice. IN THE INTERIOR. Indian opium we shall find has preceded us into the hills and river valleys of the interior. Perhaps the exigencies of weather compel us to pass a night in the bark-built hut of the wood-cutter in the forest. The son of the axe is not quite sure whether 8 The Poppy Harvest : Europeans really have three pairs of eyes and rudimentary tails,, as some Chinese writers affirm, but he is well up in the different brands and prices of Indian opium. Hour after hour he lies at night in company with a fellow workman on a frayed straw mat sucking at the inseparable pipe, and inviting by the habit a pre- mature decrepitude which his outdoor life and the scent of pine woods are unavailing to ward away. In these retired country districts, where inns are scarce, we may perhaps get an opportunity of passing a night in a small yamen or magistrate’s office. Here we shall find clerks and secretaries, and possibly the district magistrate himself, their implements of dissipation with them inside the mosquito curtains r smoking pipe after pipe till the fourth watch (2 or 3 a.m.) strikes, before they can induce sleep. A BUDDHIST MONASTERY. We spend a day or two perhaps in one of the Buddhist monasteries of the mountain country. Beads and liturgies and manuals are neglected for the fascination of the pipe. I once said to a priest as he lay smoking in one of the rooms of a monastery in which I was spending my summer holiday, “The discipline does not seem to be very strict here.” “No,” said he, “the abbot is away just now, so we have a little license.” But the staring ribs and the head slowly settling down between the shoulders like a derelict ship, and the sniffle in the voice, were not effects that could very well have been brought about by the smoking that had been going on during the abbot’s temporary absence. If we are pressed for time we perhaps make some journey by night on the rivers that intersect Chinese cities. On the bows of the anchored craft by which we glide we see pairs of boatmen stretched, with an opium lamp placed between them for common use, and alternately drawing up whiffs of the insidious narcotic and chattering to each other in those uncanny whispers which Chinese writers compare to the mutterings of restless and un- avenged ghosts. OPIUM WRECKS. Amongst these different classes we may find now and again men who have smoked twenty or thirty years with little apparent injury, and we may find men who have smoked themselves into inanity and ghastly corpsiness in half that number of months. We should scarcely be horrified to see them in coffins, but we are shocked to see them crawling through the streets, standing behind counters, stitching away at shoes, bending over books and papers. A Belgian painter of the weird has given to the world a picture of “ The Premature Burial.” If he had seen a few types of Chinese opium smokers he might have painted a companion subject “The Premature Resurrection.” Not a few of these poor wretches look as if they had come out of their graves too soon. A Study in Anglo-Indian Ethics. 9 CHINESE PICTURES. Indications of the working of the vice meet us everywhere- Walls are painted with bills exhorting men to abandon it, and giving cartoons of “ The Rake’s Progress ” order, illustrating the effects of opium. (See the explanatory note and illustrations at the beginning of this pamphlet). Medicine shops advertise pills to assist the victim in his efforts to free himself from the habit, but the pills are often preparations of opium and aggravate the mis- chief. Even the native newspapers, published at European print- ing offices, committed to the defence of the opium trade, tell of grotesque forms of retribution which have overtaken native dealers in opium, and the English proprietor has been serenely ignorant of the fact that his native editor has been unsaying all that he has been saying to his English readers. CHAPTER IV. SOME TRAGIC STORIES. Let us try and form a somewhat more precise estimate of the mischief wrought by opium. I will speak now as an eye-witness, and put some of the most tragic of my illustrations in the forefront. Not that the tragic illustrations are necessarily the most melan- choly or entitled to our most regretful sympathy, but they fix them- selves immovably in the memory and meet the demand for specific facts. A DEATH AT SEA. Some years ago I was crossing by one of the Pacific Mail Steamers from San Francisco to Hongkong. The steamers of this fleet have in the forecastle or on the forward deck a little cabin built of sheet-iron. This cabin is for the accommodation of opium smokers, and the iron with which it is constructed is of course to make it proof against the fire that would be a constant peril if indiscriminate smoking were permitted in all parts of the ship. Amongst the Chinese passengers was a shrivelled, diminutive Chinaman, scarcely five feet in height, who had spent some years in California. He had managed to scrape together a few hundred dollars, and was returning home to spend the rest of his days on what, from a Chinaman’s standpoint, was a fairly adequate fortune. This old man was a frequent visitor to the sheet-iron cabin. Sometimes he would spend whole days and the greater part of his nights there, and would just creep out twice a day to eat the few grains of rice that were all his debilitated constitution seemed to require. He really ate little more than a canary, and looked not unlike that bird as he squatted to his task. One morning, after a long opium carouse of two or three days, he was dragged from a heap of other opium smokers quite dead. The Chinese have a great antipathy to burial at sea, and the Emigration Companies of IO The Poppy Harvest : San Francisco have an engagement with the Steamship Company providing that in consideration of the payment of certain fees, the Chinaman who may happen to die at seashall be partially embalmed and kept for burial till Chinese soil is touched. I had the curiosity to go into the surgery when the doctor had this body under treat- ment and was pumping in a preparation of arsenic, carbolic acid, and oil, through an incision in the femoral artery. The thickest part of this wretched victim’s thigh would scarcely match my wrist in circumference. As the body lay on the surgery table it seemed that I could almost have taken it up on the palm of my hand. The doctor said that neither from disease nor any other cause had he seen such a case of emaciation before, and could scarcely have thought the thing possible unless he had witnessed it with his own eyes. The slimness and slenderness of the poor man’s body irresistibly suggested the image of a masher’s tightly- wrapped silk umbrella. AN UNFORTUNATE VICTIM. In the spring of the same year I lived for three months on a house-boat I had hired for missionary work on the Canton North River. One of my boatmen was an opium smoker, and I felt not a little sympathy with him, because he had taken to the drug at the beginning to get relief from pain. In a piratical attack made upon a boat in which he was employed some years before, a bullet had been lodged in his leg. Chinese surgery is not equal to the task of removing anything of that sort, so the man had to smoke to alleviate his pain. But in the course of time the disease bred by the use of opium became a very much more serious matter than the irritation of this old pellet of iron in his leg. The poor fellow used to spread out his mat just on the other side of the wooden partition against which my bed was placed, and he would lie groaning and crying out with pain half the night through. Perhaps heavier supplies of opium, if he had been able to afford them, would have given the man ease. I am afraid I was not particularly patient with the sufferer when he disturbed my rest with his cries, for I looked upon him as debauchee rather than martyr, and, I used to tell him to go and groan for the diversion of those with whom he had been smoking, and not to make me, the innocent, the partner of his midnight misery. The interruption to my slumbers did not last many weeks. One afternoon, after I had come back from preaching and was writing at my desk, the poor fellow, doubled up with pain, and on his knees, a few feet away, gave his last gasp. The skipper asked for an advance of money to buy a coffin ; the coffin containing the remains of the poor opium-smoker was put into a dug-out and a couple of boatmen started in the night to take the man’s body down stream for burial in his native village, three hundred miles away. The death was obviously due to debility caused by opium smoking, and is probably the type of many thousands of deaths per annum, in connection A Study in Anglo-Indian Ethics. n with which we and our rulers can scarcely claim to be free from blood-guiltiness. OPIUM-SMOKING BEGGARS. Two years after the incident just related, I used to be much saddened by a sight that met me evening by evening, as I returned from my customary walk. Shiu Chau Foo, the city in which I was then living, is 280 miles North of Canton and subject to severe cold in the month of January. A group of ten or fifteen beggars used to sleep in some sheds or stables on the military parade ground just outside the South gate of the city. The stables were open on two sides to the keen winter wind. I entered into con- versation with these poor creatures, and promised to buy coal for them through the cold weather, so that they could keep up a blazing fire all night and protect themselves against the biting blasts of the North. It was useless giving clothes or blankets, for they would have pawned them for opium. I told them they must come and fetch the coal I bought. One of them pleaded that he was half blind and could not see his way into the city. Another had been begging all day and was too tired to make an additional journey to fetch the coal. A third thought some one else should go. A fourth thought I might add to my other kindness that of paying the porterage and so save them the trouble of fetching for them- selves. The end of the wrangle was that the fuel was left unclaimed at the shop at which it had been bought, and the beggars sat down to boil the samples of rice they had begged, over a chip fire in a chafing-dish, and then sought to forget the cold in smoking the deadly opium refuse they had bought with their cash beggings. The night was one to make the teeth chatter. The next morning I sent out my Chinese servant to see how my scarecrow proteges were getting on. He returned with the news that one of the poor fellows, rendered insensible by opium to the cutting blasts from the North, had succumbed, and was stretched out dead on the stable floor. LEFT TO DIE. One of the reports of the Wesleyan Missionary Hospital in Fatshan tells of a man who had been smoking for five years only, and who had consumed but a limited amount of the drug. He was carried by his friends to the hospital, but the doctor declined to admit him, as his case had reached a stage at which it was hopeless. His friends refused to take him away and left him in one of the unoccupied rooms. Shortly after he was found there dead, with the opium pipe in his hand and the opium lamp still burning by his side. A TOURGOUTH PRINCE. In one of his Peking Hospital reports Dr. Dudgeon gives a pathetic story of the death of a Tourgouth prince who had been one of his patients. This young prince had gone on a casual visit to Peking and had been kept there as a hostage by the Chinese Government because of the disturbances in Ili. The peculiarity 12 The Poppy Harvest : of his position made his life at Peking sad and depressing. He took to both drinking and opium smoking, which apologists for the opium trade tell us are alternative vices. “ O,” say the ignorant camp-followers of the Indian and Colonial Governments, “ opium is beneficent, for it keeps out alcohol.” The assumption is absurd in the last degree, for the two habits are often coexistent. To return to the narrative, the young prince consented to place himself under Dr. Dudgeon’s care and give up drinking first. Alter a time he attacked the opium, which was a severer trial than breaking off drink. He surrendered all his opium-smoking instru- ments into the hands of Dr. Dudgeon, and managed to abstain for a time. His health improved, but unhappily he went out one day to visit a Chinese prince in whose palace he had once been living and from whom he had first learned the habit. Here he was be- trayed into his old besetment. Dr. Dudgeon appealed to the young prince and urged motive after motive. The penitent prince wept like a child, promised amendment, and asked the doctor to put him under treatment again. Calling his slaves he told them they were to transfer their allegiance to the doctor and obey his word rather than that of their old master upon pain of instant death. The opium crave returned in due course and he threatened one of his slaves with summary execution unless he forthwith procured fresh supplies of opium and opium-smoking implements. After endless struggles with the young prince the doctor at last succeeded in temporarily weaning him from his habit, but during the absence of his benefactor on furlough the exile succumbed to the old temptation, and eighteen months afterwards died a victim to opium But it may be said that these are extreme cases, like occasional deaths from delirium tremens at home, and that we cannot fairly make them the basis of generalisations about the use of the drug in less deleterious quantities, or be justified in impeaching upon any such limited selection of facts the morality of our trade in opium. Well, in one sense they are extreme cases. The evil has reached a pitch at which it works itself out, at least as far as this life is concerned. But I am not sure that this is the saddest chapter in the subject. A still darker record might be written of the cases in which the evil does not work itself out quickly. For one man who smokes himself into a premature grave, a score smoke themselves into disease, imbecility, intellectual decay, chronic pain, and their innocent wives and children into rags, disgrace, and starvation. Is it not possible that these cases are really sadder than the cases in which the mischief gallops ? A Study in Anglo-Indian Ethics. 13 CHAPTER V. THE MEDICAL ASPECT OF THE QUESTION. I can only make a passing reference to the medical side of the question, for it does not belong to my province, and I wish to emphasize the aspects of the question in which I can speak with the authority of an eye-witness. An essay on “ Opium Smoking and Opium Eating ” by the late Dr. George Shearer, of Liverpool, is an admirable exposition of the more technical side of the question. Opium acts as a stimulant in the primary stages of its uses and as a sedative in the secondary stages. At the beginning the natural appetites and nervous forces seem to be aroused by the drug. And afterwards all the vital powers seem benumbed, the secretions are suspended, and insomnia, indigestion, and dysentery are the later symptoms. a layman’s observations. The most casual lay observer can follow the outward ravages of the vice. I have seen opium-smokers, like parchment-covered skeletons from regions of famine, straining under the burden of sedan chairs, hanging about the offices of the Chinese mandarins, following in the wake of some traveller they were sent to escort through unsettled districts and dropping out of the march, snivell- ing over the lessons they were appointed to teach in school rooms and unable to keep themselves awake for long together. I have seen them with eyes and nose running with a kind of opium influenza inseparable from an advanced stage of the habit, with shoulders growing “higher than the ears,” as the popular Chinese description runs, and in some cases driven to such desperation by the desire for opium as to break up home and pawn, if not sell outright, wives and little ones. With very little practice nineteen times in twenty you can pick the opium-smoker out. You can detect him in the crew on the river, in the group of assistants in the shop, in the hangers-on at the yamen (court-house). In the last case it might be more correct to say you can pick out those who are not opium-smokers, for some of the mandarins’ offices are stocked with the victims, and the government administered there is strangely like government by stooping and serpentine skeletons. I have scarcely ever spoken to a smoker who has not regarded his indulgence, however light, as an evil, and begged for some specific to help him against it. ARE CHINAMEN LESS SUSCEPTIBLE THAN BURMESE OR ENGLISHMEN ? It is sometimes argued that, though the use of opium may be bad for an Englishman, and so hurtful to the Burmese that the H T he Poppy Harvest : British government prohibits its sale to them, yet that the Chinese constitution may have special qualities that enable it to resist the worst effects of opium. The Spectator used that argument some years ago. The logic reminds me of the Chinaman’s mental standpoint when he is pressed to take foreign medicine. John C. has a wonderful opinion of foreign surgery, but not quite so flattering an estimate of foreign medicines. When I have seen him suffering from internal complications native doctors were unable to under- stand or unfit to treat, I have sometimes said, “ Why do you not go for advice to the Missionary Hospital ? I am sure the doctor would be able to help you.” And the reply has been, “ Sir, the English doctors are very clever with the knife. If it were a question of tumour or gravel or cataract I would go at once. But your drugs have been adjusted to the Englishman’s constitution and might very seriously derange ours. If we were to take these drugs tempered to Western idiosyncrasies, sedatives and stimulants, astringents and aperients might be found to have changed places with each other, and terrible disaster follow from their inverse action. The phar- macopoeia has not been regulated to our constitution and special habit of body.” The Spectator, by its grotesque physiological plea in the interests of the Indian revenue, puts itself in the same scientific category with the Chinaman who argues that the action of specific drugs has definite race limits. We are “ fearfully and wonderfully made,” but if one branch of the human race had been, constituted with a miraculous capacity for resisting the worst effects of opium, so that the Indian revenue 'might be kept up without trouble to the British conscience, the construction of John Chinaman would have been a thousandfold more wonderful than, the Psalmist imagined. CHAPTER VI. OPIUM AND ALCOHOL. The apologists for this sinister traffic often draw a comparison between opium and alcohol, and argue from some imaginary par- allel between the two things that till wc suppress the use of alcohol in England we are under no moral obligation to abandon our opium monopoly in India and co-operate with the Chinese authorities in putting down smoking within Chinese territories. The contention will not go for very much with the increasing number of people who are convinced that some further restriction must be placed on the facilities for the sale of intoxicating liquors in England so as to abate the present national plague. But I for one am not prepared to concede all that is claimed by this analogy. This comparison between opium and alcohol needs to be carefully and thoughtfully carried out and will then I am sure leave a grave balance of evil on the side of opium. A Study in Anglo-Indian Ethics. 15 The statement was made some time ago by one who had been a resident in China, that in the course of a Saturday night’s walk through East London he had seen more mischief and misery caused by the use of drink than he had seen resulting from the use of opium in China through quite a large term of years. An evil cannot always be accurately guaged by what is seen in the streets and some venerable European residents in the East have scarcely more than a street and sedan-chair acquaintance with Chinese life. OPIUM IS A SEDATIVE. I will put the one point first in which opium compares favour- ably with alcohol. Opium-smoking is not a noisy or boisterous or demonstrative evil. It does not confuse and inflame the nerve centres, and make men stagger and turn them temporarily mad. I do not know that I have seen men reel under the influence of it. It does not make them vociferous, quarrelsome, violent. I have never seen the skeletons in these opium dens grow offensively or aggressively pugnacious under the influence of the fumes. I have not seen opium street-fights. I have not heard opium-smokers hiccup rowdy and ribald songs, punctuated with blasphemy, as they have turned out of the opium shops at night and have groped for their homes. After a time opium begins to allay and deaden the passions. Some one may argue that the suppression of animal appetite is good and cannot very well be scored as an indictment against opium. But exorcisms other than by moral victories of the will end always in the annexation of the nature by seven devils fouler and more wicked than the first. The Chinese opium-smoker whose elementary passions have been tamed, lowered, and possibly obliterated by the use of the drug, is not the paragon of goodness his mild, languid, inoffensive manner, and whispery, wheezy, cotton-wool kind of voice might seem to suggest. OPIUM MORE POTENT THAN ALCOHOL. Judged by practical tests opium is a more powerful agent than alcohol. It is easy to implant an opium crave in the lower orders of animal life, but I should question whether it would be equally easy to implant a crave for alcohol. A writer in the China Review relates that he was once walking through the streets of Canton and saw a Chinaman passing along with a bird in his hand that did not belong to any of the domesticated orders and seemed an unlikely subject for the art of the bird-tamer. Suddenly the Chinaman threw the bird into the air and after it had made a considerable circuit it came back at his call and quietly settled on his arm. Europeans are sometimes struck by the extraordinary power the Chinese have of taming wild creatures of the field and forest. I once asked a Chinaman how the thing was done, and he replied, “ By mixing opium with the food. It is possible to i6 The Poppy Harvest: domesticate a rat by this expedient and make it come at your call as obediently as a dog. Give it food mixed with opium for a few days and then set it free. No food it can procure by its own foraging •expeditions will satisfy the artificial appetite that has been im- planted, and it will come back meekly for a meal prepared with opium as sauce or dressing.” I am told that all the beetles and cockroaches will die in a shut-up opium den, but cannot vouch for the fact. They have become so accustomed to the fumes, it is said, that an insatiable opium appetite has been created within them. I question whether the spiders in a tap-room would fall before an extraordinary wave of mortality if the licence should be withdrawn, or whether the keepers at the Zoological gardens in London could tame bears and tigers by soaking their food for a week or two in schnaps or mountain dew, and ensure obedience to the whistle if they were taken for a short promenade down Tottenham Court Road. These trivial illustrations, however, apart, the presumption from practical observation is that opium is the stronger and more dangerous agent. OPIUM MORE WEAKENING. Opium is debilitating in a sense alcohol can scarcely be said to be by our most ardent temperance reformers. An opium-smoker who has contracted the habit for two or three months can almost always be picked out, however small the quantity he uses. That could certainly not be said of moderate drinking, and shows that moderate opium-smoking, if we may be allowed the phrase, occupies the same position amongst the Chinese that actual intemperance does amongst the races of Europe. Reaction, it is said, always follows the artificial increase of circulation produced by the use of alcohol ; but as a rule drinking does not tend to thin a man down. He becomes gross and bloated through his indulgence. After a very short spell of opium-smoking however, a man becomes cadaverised and emaciated in appearance, especially if he is unable to command a full supply of rich fattening food. The Chinese everywhere admit this, and the smokers most readily of all. I will give an incidental illustration of this. The Chinese have a strong prejudice against the use of milk that almost runs into a religious sentiment. In the Treaty Ports, Chinamen are generally found sufficiently enterprising to set aside their scruples and keep dairies for the supply of the European communities with milk; but in the interior it is almost impossible to buy fresh milk. I was once travelling by boat through the country, and, as is my usual habit, left the boat in the cool of the twilight for a walk along the river-bank. I happened to meet a Chinaman who was carrying a jar of fresh, rich buffalo-milk. I tried to coax him to sell me some, but not a drop of the precious fluid could I get from him for love •or money. “ I cannot part with it, whatever price you offer.” A Study in Anglo-Indian Ethics. 17 “ Why not ? ” I replied. “ O it is all bespoken by the frequenters of the opium-divans in the next village. I take it round every night. The smokers drink it to counteract the debility brought on by the use of opium.” Now if we could find men going round to the public houses and gin palaces every night hawking bovril and chicken-broth and cod-liver-oil to spirit drinkers to counteract the effect of intoxicating liquors upon the constitution, this parallel between alcohol and opium might be maintained. If an English- man thought it desirable to dose himself with quinine and iron to counteract the effect of every glass of Burton Ale or Burgundy he sipped, the inference would be that he had found out by experience that intoxicating beverages are much more debilitating than is now commonly supposed by our fellow-countrymen. THE OPIUM HABIT MORE TYRANNOUS. I am an ardent temperance reformer, but I have no hesitation in saying that opium creates a more tyrannous appetite in a larger proportion of the people who use it, than do wine and beer amongst those indulging in such luxuries. One morning I was standing in an opium shop talking to one of the assistants, when a man came in to buy his allowance of opium for the day. His dose was comparatively modest, about one-fiftieth part of an ounce, for which he paid forty cash, a sum equal to three or four pence of our English money. I noticed he brought two little circular boxes in which to put his opium, and said to the assistant in the shop, “ Is he buying for two different people, as he brings these two separate cases to hold this very small quantity ? ” “ O no,” said the assistant, “ by this plan he gets about one-five hundredth part of an ounce more.” “How is that?” I said. “We allow one thousandth part of an ounce down-weight on the weight of the case into which the opium is put. By asking for it in two separate lots the man gets the down-weight twice over.” The appetite that will lead a man into a minute calculation of this sort must be masterful indeed Imagine an English workman asking for his pint in ten tenth-pint glasses for the sake of getting an extra drop in each separate vessel ! Would not that mean a stronger appetite than beer seems to create, judged by all past observation ? I do not wish to underrate the evil wrought by alcohol, but I think opium is the more despotic and mischievous luxury. In crossing a ferry at sundown near the city of Ying Tak, I had as my fellow passengers four beggars who were returning from their daily prowl. Each of these four woe-begone creatures had a daub of opium on a bamboo leaf. The spirit of the interviewer seized me, and I asked how much each man might have managed to beg during the day. “ Fifty or sixty cash,” was the reply, that is, about four-pence of our English money. “ How much have you spent on your opium ? ” “ About thirty or forty cash.” “ And have you only spent ten cash (a penny) on the meal of rice you are going to take to night ? ” “ That is all, sir ; we can go without rice, but we cannot go without opium.” Of course an i8 The Poppy Harvest : English drunkard will loathe food when he is in one of his revels; but there is this difference between the appetite for drink and the appetite for opium — -the drunkard has his outbreak two or three times a month, and it is during that limited period only that he sacrifices food to his eagerness for drink. But in a Chinaman’s longing for opium there are no ebbs and flows. He must have the same amount every day, and when he famishes himself to obtain the drug it is not in an occasional revel only, but for three hundred and sixty-five days of the year. Look the fact fairly in the face, as it touches the indigent sections of Chinese society. Three- quarters of what these old scarecrows had begged, to go in opium, and the desire for opium stronger than the desire for food and drink ! In no part of the United Kingdom has ordinary drinking reached that pitch. Three penny worth of beer a day would scarcely enkindle a chronic madness of that sort. THE AVERAGE OPIUM SMOKER COMPARABLE TO THE HABITUAL DRUNKARD. The opium appetite of the average smoker is as strong as the desire of the habitual drunkard for intoxicants, and the trade is not like a trade some proportion of which may go to the production of debauchery only, but a trade that would find a true parallel if a brewer or distiller produced a liquor, a single sip of which would make a man drunk, and which, if persisted in but for awhile, would leave him the permanent slave of tippling propensities. Take another illustration of the more sinister potency of opium. When a man is breaking off opium, he admits the need there is for a doctor to lock him up in the ward of a hospital for ten or fifteen days and treat him as a temporary lunatic. And if you will take up the reports of any of the Missionary Hospitals in China you will find that this is true not only of the men who smoke an ounce of opium a day but of those no less who take only the hundredth part of that amount. And so strong is their longing for opium when they are shut up for treatment in opium wards, that they will give almost any bribe to the attendants to get opium. The medical officers of these institutions find it very difficult to get ward-keepers sufficently proof against the handsome rewards offered by the smokers who are passing through the first agonies of abstinence. Dysentery and distressing affections that cannot be very well specified in detail, invariably come with the earlier stages of fasting from the drug. The missionary who was my fellow-worker in Shiu Chau Foo used to dispense medicines to the poor and suffering Chinese around us, and our house was often besieged at night by Chinamen who were trying to break off opium without going down to Canton to the Hospital, who were suffering martyrdoms in their struggles, and, wanted embrocations to relieve the pain of aching limbs, sleeping draughts to help them through the night, and antidotes for sundry other symptoms. a captain's story. Sometime ago I was speaking upon this question in an important A Study in Anglo-Indian Ethics. 19 sea-port, and the next day received the following written statement from a captain, which confirms my assertions. “ In the year 1868 I was on a voyage from Bangkok to Hongkong. My cargo consisted of rice, and was owned by Chinese merchants. I had two super- cargoes on board and their attendants, consisting altogether of thirteen persons. I had to find state-rooms for the supercargoes, their attendants slept on deck. All I had to provide in the shape of food was water. They had a good stock of provisions with them, and of the best kind. During the afternoons the merchants had their opium smokes in the cabins. At first I could not make out what they were doing. There was a peculiar smell in the cabin, and it always gave me and my officers a violent head-ache, and obliged us to keep out in the air for some time. I was at a loss to know the cause of our indisposition when below. I soon found out, however, that they were indulging in opium. I courteously told them that I could not allow them to smoke in the cabin, as it was making myself and officers ill, but I would clear the long-boat for them, and as it had a deck over it, it would be very comfortable, and they might indulge in the drug there to their hearts’ content. They accepted my plan and made it their smoking saloon. We had contrary winds, which made our passage much longer than we expected. After a while I missed the supercargoes on deck, and inquired of their attendants what was the matter with their masters. They told me they were ‘ sick.’ Sometime afterwards on enquiring again that they were ‘ very ill ; ’ and again ‘ that they were dying.’ Not wishing them to die on my hands, I enquired the cause of their illness. The attendants told me that as I was making such a long passage, much longer than they expected, their opium was all finished ; and if we did not soon arrive at our destination they would be dead. They asked me if I had any opium on board. I told them I had not. Afterwards I thought of the opium pills in the medicine-chest, and that they might allay their sufferings. I gave each of them one pill every day at noon, and from about ten in the morning until noon they used to watch my every movement with eager eyes till the time came when they were to secure their daily allowance. I had the satisfaction of taking them alive to Hongkong, and was very much thanked by their friends, and ever after, during my stay there, was a welcome visitor at their ‘hongs.’ A fresh tea-pot was always brought in and used round in honour of my visit. I carried several cargoes for the same people afterwards, and was always most liberally dealt with.” Now if a man had not taken more than two glasses of beer a day we should come to the conclusion that the beer must be of a very singular brew if these symptoms appeared when he happened to be the guest of an abstaining friend for a week. If the man who had never drunk to excess had to go into Hospital for a fort- night to qualify physically for the fulfilment of the temperance pledge, there would be no room whatever for the controversy 20 The Poppy Harvest : about the effects of alcohol that is carried on at times in our serial literature. Do not these facts make it sufficently clear that the trade of which our Indian Government has the monopoly, and unwilling participation in which, we have forced upon the Chinese by war-exacted treaties, is unspeakably less reputable even than the liquor trade ? CHAPTER VII. CHINESE OPINION ABOUT OPIUM. The Chinese witness against this evil is absolutely unanimous. In private pamphlets, in government notifications, in cartoons pasted on the walls of tea-houses, we may see for ourselves how complete is the consensus of opinion. CHINESE TOLERANCE. Now the Chinese have no leanings to Puritanism. The tem- perament of the race is averse from rigour, fanaticism, needless self-denial. The Chinese knew what drunkenness was two thousand years before the birth, of Christ, for in one of the oldest documents of the Chinese language there is a quaint tirade against the Imperial Astronomer who had been tippling and allowed the orbit of the Sun to get very much out of order. At intervals the critical evil of Great Britain and America threatened to become a grave problem in China. Confucius in one of his sayings admitted that he himself was not altogether immaculate in his use of wine, and yet the Chinese look upon him as the embodiment of virtue. But it has never occurred to any native moralist to initiate a total abstinence movement. Total abstinence, it is true, has been practised as a religious discipline, but no reformer has ever denounced all wine- drinking and regarded total abstinence as an essential to the moral salvation of the empire. Polygamy has thriven all but unrebuked in China for three or four thousand years. Public opinion is lenient to these domestic extravagances. The Chinaman’s industry is only equalled by his tolerant attitude towards all kinds of pleasures and pastimes. And yet he has always condemned the moderate use of opium, as we condemn the excess of the man who has brought him- self to delirium tremens, and the trade in opium is regarded every where as a shameful and infamous pursuit. The Chinese are very fond of numerical groups of ideas. Virtues and vices are put to- gether in suggestive and inseparable associations. Opium-smoking has a front rank in a triad of vices sufficently flagitious, “gambling,” “ unchastity,” “opium-smoking.” Thousands of tracts upon opium have been published by non-Christian writers. I have read through more than a score, but have never yet met with one that took the ground that opium was evil only in certain cases in which it was taken to excess and that a moderate and innocuous use of it was common and practicable. TREATIES EXCLUDING OPIUM. China insists upon inserting into every new treaty with Western powers a clause forbidding the subjects of that power to A Study in Anglo-Indian Ethics. 21 trade in opium. The last treaty with Germany has a clause of that sort, as well as the last treaty with the United States of America. We shall soon be the only power possessing the privilege of debauching at will the swarming millions of the Chinese ant-heap. Into our treaty with Japan a clause has been introduced forbidding the importation of opium into that charming country. Japan is China’s nearest neighbour, and is likely to have very much clearer actual knowledge of the evil bred by the use of opium than the Anglo-Indian Government at Calcutta and Simla, or the Secretary of State for India. Is it possible that the miracle of Gideon’s fleece is being repeated, and that the article that is so noxious in Japan, against which death-penalties are levelled, and to the exclusion of which we have consented to pledge our- selves by treaty, should become a boon as soon as one has crossed the gulf of Pechili or the Formosa channel ? Eastern opinion pure and simple must be allowed to settle this question, rather than the cooked-to-order asseverations of Downing Street and Calcutta financiers. From the days of Commissioner Lin, who more than half a century ago was sent forth by the Peking Gov- ernment to stamp out opium, right on to the days of Li Hung Chang, the most notable Chinese statesmen of the hour, through square acres of pamphlets and placards and proclamations, the cry has been uniformly the same without a syllable of variation. Now this is a most important element in the question. MISSIONARY OPINION. The opinions of five hundred and fifty Protestant missionaries from America, Germany, Great Britain should surely count for something. These missionaries are sometimes represented as an undisciplined host, without common formularies or concerted methods of action, or even a common term for God and a common translation of the Bible : but they are absolutely at one in the judgment they pass upon opium, and agree in making the use of the drug from which the Indian Government draws so much of its revenue, a bar to Church membership. And the public opinion of the native churches abundantly sustains them. WHAT IS GOOD FOR ENGLAND MAY NOT BE GOOD FOR CHINA. But even if opium were proved to be a more trivial evil than alcohol, it would be difficult to find sound ground for maintaining that the same facilities should be granted for the trade in opium in China as are accorded for the sale of intoxicants in England. Are the conditions of Chinese life such a perfect counterpart of the condition of English life that we can fairly claim the same freedom for the Chinese to follow vice there that some politicians account an essential part of the idea of liberty in England ? Most men are coming to feel that at home we have suffered the temptation to evil to outrun that growth in popular rectitude and self-control necessary to withstand the temptation, and when the masses of our electors perceive this derangement of equilibrium, reform cannot be long postponed. The strong individuality and 22 The Poppy Harvest : self-government that ought to have been developed by centuries of Christian discipline and instruction in Western nations might be expected to make resistance to the temptations of our drink traffic possible. It is scarcely to be expected that there will be the same power of moral resistance in the masses of an unevangelised country. The tendency of Oriental despotisms is to suppress in- dividuality. We claim little less than inevitable ruin for the Chinese, if we maintain that the freedom accorded to the sale of opium in China should be exactly parallel with the freedom for the sale of intoxicating liquors in England. If intoxicants were carried into the play-grounds of our Board Schools by licensed hawkers, and children verging on their teens were seen staggering about in a state of drunkenness, or stretched helpless upon the earth, the loudest political friends of the licensed victuallers would be crying out for restrictions on the traffic. One often finds a more strongly-compacted and better-braced individuality in an average British school boy than in an average Chinaman. The claim for a modified free trade in opium forgets that the Chinese character is inferior to the Anglo-Saxon in moral robustness and resisting power. HOW GREENLAND WAS PROTECTED. Fifty years ago the Danish Government prohibited the sale of spirits amongst the Esquimaux of Greenland, and the population has increased fifty' per cent since that step was taken. If the sale of spirits had been allowed, so disastrous is the effect when any chance throws them in the way of the people, the Esquimaux would probably have disappeared by this time. We should pro- voke the just execration of contemporary nations if we were to say, “ That is a breach of our peculiar traditions of liberty. Moreover we have a few big distillers in England and Scotland, and in their interest, as well as to vindicate the political freedom of the poor Esquimaux themselves, we shall claim that this paternal despotism shall come to an end. We will break in upon the restrictions of the Danish Government and bestow upon these simple, kindly people the same genial privileges and enfranchisements as the happy crowds in Whitechapel Road, London, Scotland Road, Liverpool, and Arg)de Street, Glasgow, possess.” In our internat- ional policy are we not bound to pay some kind of respect to the idiosyncrasies of friendly races? We have no more right to foster the spread of the opium habit by protecting it with our own precise type of civil liberty, than we have to transplant our social etiquette or our national customs, many points in which are alien to the best traditions of a Chinaman’s training. A NICARAGUAN WASP. The fact that different vices may attack the health and moral integrity of different races in various ways is fatal to the validity of this much-asserted parallelism. A traveller in Nicaragua tells us that one species of wasp in that little-known territory never stings on the surface of the skin. It has always been accustomed A Study in Anglo-Indian Ethics. 23 to exercise its unamiable attentions upon monkeys, and it has acquired the habit of going down to the roots of the hair before commencing business. It would not be very reasonable in us to require a Nicaraguan, who wished to wear head-gear that would protect hair and skin against invasions of this sort, to don the few feathers that do duty for ladies’ hats, even though the grouping was of the latest Parisian design. A Chinaman is neither the exact duplicate of an Englishman in character, nor does the opium- temptation attack him in precisely the same way as the temptation to drink attacks an Englishman. A vice may give very little indication of its presence till incurable mischief has been wrought. It may go below the surface before it begins to sting. But we practically say to the Chinese : “ You shall not wear the political visor of wholesale repression, with which you desire to protect your people against the attacks of opium. You shall be as light and unencumbered as we are. What a dainty little Phrygian cap it is that the goddess of our national liberty wears ! ” But our wasps may sting on the surface only, and a Chinaman’s may work their way into positions from which he cannot dislodge them, so that the visor is a matter of life and death to him. On these questions the Chinese must judge for themselves. FORCING OPIUM ON CHINA. Would not our indignation be justly stirred if we saw some hardened desperado, out in Texas or California, of the type Bret Harte could paint for us, sitting down to the table with an un- sophisticated emigrant youth from the East, and, with revolver by his side, insisting that his young acquaintance should drink glass for glass ? The youth blushes and protests, and is as angry as he dare venture to show, at the extent to which he has been already led on and betrayed. “ Nay, stranger, but I know my own constitution best. Let me stop. I shall be overcome.” “ Seest thou that six shooter ? Thou shalt drink glass for glass. My liquor is stronger than thine, and if thou wilt not take the same freedom with thy weaker stuff, out go thy brains.” The picture is an extravagance to which no transatlantic painter of border life and manners would commit himself, and yet, in all sobriety, that is a fair delineation of our policy towards China. “ It is evil only, and that continually, and we cannot rest under the curse ” cries China with scarcely a dissentient voice. “ Nay,” cries England by the mouth of its merchants and diplomatists and Colonial hangers-on, “ it is not half so bad as the gin, rum, and brandy in which our happy citizens wallow, and when we leave off dram-drinking you shall have treaties that will help you to get rid of opium. Remember the gunboats in the back ground.” Under any circumstances, it must be iniquitous for us to ne- gociate and enforce upon the Chinese, treaties the principles of which are trimmed to the precedents of our liquor laws. We must remember that the Chinese have no opportunity of making their voices heard in the British parliament or nation. A vivisec- 24 T he Poppy Harvest : tionist sometimes puts his victim under the influence of a drug which leaves the poor creature acutely sensitive to pain but paralyses the nerve-centres through which pain is expressed. It seems to me that the Chinese people are in some such unhappy position as that. We afflict them with our infamous traffic, and leave them no op- portunity of expressing their sense of the moral cruelty practised upon them. In thousands of Chinese homes the victims of our national unrighteousness writhe in pain and tribulation. But no protest commensurate with the magnitude of the evil is possible. At the most, a missionary here and there tells the public what he has seen, and a few earnest moralists in our legislature feel that things are not as they should be, and bring in their periodic protest. And then there are years of silence, and the portentous tragedy of suffering goes steadily on in the dim empire of the Far East. CHAPTER VIII. POLITICAL SURVEY. In order to estimate the degree of our responsibility for all the evils brought upon the Chinese nation through the use of opium, it will be necessary to refer to three stages in the history of our relations with the Chinese Government. These stages link themselves with the names of three Chinese cities, and have for their landmarks two treaties, and a supplementary Convention signed after long and irritating delay. The first treaty was ratified in 1842 and links itself with the name of a huge, ruined city on the right bank of the Yang Tsze, the geographical centre of the Chinese empire, and the seat of the Imperial Government during the middle ages- — Nanking. Nanking means Southern Capital. The treaty of Nanking marks the first official stage of our relations with the Chinese. The second landmark is a later treaty which connects itself with the name of Tientsin. Tientsin is a mud- built city, knee-deep in sludge after rain, and neck-deep in dust after sunshine. It is the port of Peking, and contains about half a million people. The treaty of Tientsin was signed in 1858. The third stage in our relations associates itself with the name of a salubrious little watering place, about 200 miles South of Tientsin, to which Europeans retreat for a breath of fresh air in the hot summer months, when they are able. The Chefoo Convention was signed in 1876, but, owing to the unwillingness of our Govern- ment to fall in with the Chinese proposals for the taxation of opium, was not ratified till nine years afterwards. THE OPIUM WAR. The war brought to a close by the treaty of Nanking in 1842 is commonly known as “the opium war; ” and I am sorry to say the judgment implied in the popular name is only too exactly descriptive of its motive. Opium was first introduced to the seaboard of China by Portuguese traders. Possibly Arab traders brought it across the Western and South Western frontiers about A Study in Anglo-Indian Ethics. 25 the same time, but this question is wrapped in more or less of un- certainty. It was under the fostering care of the East India Company that the first serious development of the trade took place. Till the close of the first half of the present century no com- mercial treaties with Western nations existed. A native guild, consisting of eight or nine wealthy merchants, received a charter from the Peking Government to trade with Europeans. The in- structions of that government to European traders were communi- cated through this guild. It was a stipulated condition of its charter that it should not engage in the opium trade. This en- gagement was most honourably carried out by the members of the guild, and not a single firm represented in the guild ever had tran- sactions in opium. During the trading months, the Europeans lived in a group of buildings on the Canton river, known as the “ Factories.” From the outset of its history the East India Company had been engaged in an illicit opium trade. A group of unorthodox Chinese mer- chants, without the privilege of an imperial charter, arose, called “ outside merchants,” and through their hands the surreptitious opium-importations of the East India Company were distributed amongst the people. The ships carrying opium usually anchored at an island at the mouth of the Canton river called “ Ling Ting ” or “Solitude.” The island, which is seventy miles east of Canton, occupies about the same relation to that city that the Isle of Man does to Liverpool, or Arran to Glasgow. The agents of the East India Company, and in the course of time the merchants who in- vaded its monopoly, effected sales of the opium, which was then brought up to the city of Canton in native craft or distributed along the coast, with the bribed connivance of the native officials, or in armed defiance of them if they were not reasonably corruptible. The thing went on from year to year. No wonder the Peking Government was conservative and looked askance upon foreign trade. In ever increasing numbers the official classes were be- coming corrupted, and the unofficial, debilitated and demoralised. At last the Peking Government resolved to stamp out the insidious trade ; and if it had only been foot and mouth disease, or rinderpest, some of our politicians might have been able to appreciate the programme. The tooth and nail apologists for our national procedure say, “ If Peking is sincere in its opposition to opium, let there be a whole- hearted attempt to put down its use in Chinese territory. The evil can be adequately dealt with by domestic measures.” Well, the experiment has been made. Let us see if it succeeded, and how far the sympathy of John Bull was given to John Pigtail. An Imperial Edict was issued threatening all who should either smoke or purvey the drug with capital punishment. Not infrequently the extreme penalty was carried out, although the Imperial Government ran the risk of stirring up insurrection by 26 T he Poppy Harvest : this drastic measure. The Chinese are apt to carry out their decisions in ways that are more or less grotesque from our stand- point, and at last they resolved to perform one of these executions under conditions that would appeal to the pity of those British merchants who might be humane, and carry terror to the hearts of the others who had got beyond the tender stage. A native opium-dealer was brought down from the city by the mandarins and strangled on the open space in front of the “ Factories,” right under the very noses of the European merchants. A few months passed without any sign of repentance or improvement on their part, and the mandarins proposed to repeat the object-lesson and give a fresh shock to the sensibilities of these hard-hearted mer- chants. Half a dozen British sailors had come up that afternoon from Wong Po to the Factories for an outing and were pro- specting for the chance of a dashing, good-natured, practical joke. They kicked into pieces the chairs and tables and tents of the mandarins who had come to superintend the execution, pulled up the stake to which the victim had been tied, and tried to rescue the victim. The mandarins with their underlings, executioner, and victim retired into the city and carried out the sentence else- where. Providence did not seem to favour the attempt of the Chinese authorities to suppress opium from within, at least not by the penalties they sought to inflict under the eyes of the foreigners. Next came a step that touched the interests of these British opium-smugglers, and the pride of the Government that patronised them, a little more closely. The Chinese authorities demanded, through the chartered guild-merchants, that the foreign merchants should surrender all the opium in the receiving ships at Ling Ting. Now if the opium was contraband the demand was absolutely legitimate. For some days the demand was parried. The mandarins then boycotted the Factories. Servants in European employ were ordered to leave, and supplies were as rigorously cut off as though the Factories had been in a state of siege. The war upon which we shortly entered was surely not justified by that step. Boycotting is not made an occasion of war at home. Two English opium-merchants were next put under arrest till such time as the contraband opium should be delivered up. They were not subjected to the slightest ill treatment. We had no treaty with China conceding exterritorial rights to British subjects, and I do not know how their detention could be considered as an in- ternational offence to be wiped out in blood. I imagine that if a syndicate of Dutch or German merchants were to establish a monster shebeen at the mouth of the Thames, Clyde, or Mersey, and run boat-loads of rum and whiskey into London, Glasgow, or Liverpool, and fire upon our revenue cutters and guard- boats if resisted, we should require them to appear before our magistrates, and possibly send them to spend a day or two in a police-cell pending the magistrate’s decision. Should we call it a righteous war if all Europe were to pounce down upon us and A Study in Anglo-Indian Ethics. 27 loot our cities because our magistrates had had the courage to so deal with a wealthy foreign syndicate of liquor smugglers ? Under this comparatively mild pressure, twenty thousand chests of opium valued at two millions sterling were given up. A trench was dug near the mouth of the Canton river and lined with quick lime. The opium balls were put into the trench, sea-water let in, and twenty thousand boxes of undigested disease and emaciation and death destroyed at one fell swoop. Whenever I passed the Bocca Tigris on occasional journeys between Canton and Hongkong, I always thought of that spot as holy ground. Well, because the Chinese Government thought fit to boycott these British shebeeners and possess itself of their illicit stock-in- trade, we sent our war-ships up Chinese rivers, we gave the word to our red-jackets to scale the walls and burst the gates of Chinese cities, and made ourselves the terror by which Chinese mothers often frighten their children to the present day. The terms at which we asked China to buy off our army were three million dollars for our merchant smugglers, six million dollars indemnity for the contraband opium that had been destroyed, the war-bill, besides the legalisation of opium and a few other unconsidered trifles. The Chinese consented to pay the bill, smugglers, War- Office, Admiralty, in full. They also conceded the island of Hong- kong for our occupation, opened five treaty ports to European trade —a most indulgent concession when we think of the character of a large proportion of the trade; but the legalisation of the opium trade was resolutely refused. No wonder the Chinese, with such an education as we have given them in the past, are Conservative. My wonder is that they are not a hundred-fold more so. And so the Nanking Treaty was signed in 1842. THK LORCHA ARROW WAR. The first conflict over and the rights of merchants assured by Treaty, things went on much as usual for the next twelve or four- teen years. The position of foreigners was more freely recognised. The newly-opened ports became not only centres of legitimate trade, but the breeding-ground of those stormy petrels, the opium smugglers. The secret imports of the drug doubled, trebled, quad- rupled. In the meantime the Government of India had passed into the hands of the Queen. Then came what is known as the “ Lorcha Arrow ” war, a war springing up indirectly out of opium smuggling and yielding as its chief fruits the legalisation of opium and the toleration of Christianity. The bracketing of these two things seems like a grotesque profanity: but there they stand side by side. The toleration of Christianity was Lord Palmerston’s sop to the church-going section of the British public. In the course of the war, Canton, Chinkiang, Tientsin had been sacked, and the Emperor’s summer palace outside the walls of Peking looted. The Chinese Government was utterly humiliat- ed and no longer maintained its unflinching opposition. Lord 28 The Poppy Harvest: Elgin and his Interpreters, in the name of the Queen, wheedled and coaxed : menaces were no longer needed. “ Best thing all round. Quarrels sure to arise whilst opium is contraband. The smuggler cannot be scotched. Forget your pride and go back on past traditions. Take a million of revenue out of it for yourselves if you think well. Legalise the drug, and then you shall be free to tax it at your discretion.” LEGALISATION OF THE TRAFFIC. And so China, coaxed and cowed by turns out of all self- respect, consented in the end to legalise opium, but with two very important reservations. Whilst the British opium merchant was to pay a tax of thirty taels per cwt. on opium at the port of entry, the Chinese government was to be free to tax it a second or third or fourth time, if it thought well, in the successive stages of its transit into the far regions of the interior. By paying dues in advance on ordinary goods destined for the interior, the British merchant could get a discount of fifty per cent off the ordinary dues. But no such privilege could be claimed for opium. The native officials were to have full liberty to put the fetters of heavy taxation on the monster in its peregrinations through the interior. And so in 1858 the Treaty of Tientsin, forced by war, and legalising an evil against which China had struggled for a generation, with a tenacity, a disinterestedness, a self-respect, an unselfish heroism worthy of the purest and most chivalrous nation in Christendom, was signed. No wonder the Chinese have a peculiar antipathy to foreigners. Should we have loved John Chinaman with surpassing ardour if he had held the whip end in these transactions and had treated us after our own political codes and canons ? It is sometimes said : “ These wars only compelled the per- mission of the trade in opium, the Chinese were still free to suppress the use of the drug within their own borders, and it is not fair to speak of opium as a thing that has been forced upon the Chinese.” Well, we do not actually ram it down the Chinese gullet in person, as the artilleryman rams his canister of shot down the rifled cannon, or the veterinary surgeon puts the bolus he has prepared into the horse’s stomach. But we make a place for the temptation by force. The distinction is so subtle, that if a Church Council had drawn it, the point would have been a stock-property of the literary jokist for centuries. The nurse does not put the medicine down the infant’s throat, but she puts it where it is sure to go, and then nips his nose. The child is forced, unless he has the heroism for juvenile suicide. Of course we do not force opium upon the Chinese, we simply run it into the ports, and then tweak the nose of the Chinese government. We are sometimes reminded of the very fine threads spun by metaphysical theologians, but they are ocean cables in comparison with the artistic achievements of these spidery political casuists. A Study in Anglo-Indian Ethics. 29 THE CHEFOO CONVENTION. Now we come to the last stage in the history of our relations with the Chinese Government upon this most painful question. I refer to the drafting and signature of the Chefoo Convention in the autumn of 1876 and its tardy confirmation about ten years afterwards. Five new ports were opened by that convention to European trade, and for ten years we did not scruple to take ad- vantage of that concession, whilst we refused to allow the Chinese Government the freedom it wished to claim under that Convention for the taxation of opium. The Peking authorities having found the system of double taxation unnecessarily costly and cumbersome, alarmed by the fact that the imports of Indian opium had reached the enormous total of seventy thousand chests a year, and startled at the thought that the misery produced by such a consumption of opium must soon be beyond remedy and control, desired tariff reforms. China proposed to abolish entirely the system of interior taxation for European goods which had hitherto existed, and in exchange for that concession it asked permission from the British Government to impose a tax upon opium at the port of entry amounting to 120 taels per cwt. For close upon ten long years the battle was raging. Sir Thomas Wade threatened the Chinese Government, and from a Memorial presented by Tso Tsung Tang to the Chinese throne would seem to have lost his diplomatic meekness and affability now and again. “ Thomas Wade main- tained opinions at variance with those of your servants. There was a considerable change in his language, and with reference to the augmentation of the price ot opium he showed as much irrita- tion as if the qhange were something to be deplored.” It is rather humiliating to find our representative so gibbeted in a Memorial to the throne. The Chinese Government firmly insisted upon its right to raise the taxation to the higher figure. For ten long years, with patient continuance in evil-doing, the British minister higgled to cheapen the price at which China’s millions should be debauched and demoralised, but the Peking Government, by astute and imperturbable statesmanship, and by the right of its virtuous cause, at last carried the day. THE PRESENT POSITION. We are told that with this last concession the offence of the opium trade has ceased, for the Chinese are now allowed to tax it at their own higher figure. Not a few politicians viewed the opium trade with scruple and inward discomfort on this one ground, that we had dictated in the past the amount of the duty the Chinese were to lay upon opium, and infringed the rights and liberties of the Imperial Government. But the man who has any care for the elementary principles of morality and righteousness will look at the question from other standpoints. Britain can never recover in any degree her fair fame, till the Anglo-Indian Government dissociates itself from the monopoly it has' hitherto held in the 3 ° The Poppy Harvest : cultivation of opium. That is the next thing for which in season and out of season the Christian Church must agitate. But even then our task will not be complete. Till the Chinese Government is allowed after due notice to raise the tariff to a prohibitive figure if need be, it can never feel itself free-handed to grapple with the terrible plague that is working in the eighteen provinces of the empire. In the Blue Book which records the negociations to which I have made reference, there is to be found a proposal made by the Peking Government itself to wipe out the opium trade in the course of a fixed number of years, by a graduated scale of diminishing production. In connection with that proposal the Peking Government offered to suppress the native opium, the cultivation of which has sprung up from time to time in different parts of the empire, in defiance of imperial law and edict. Is it not a thing to make us blush, that an equitable proposal of that sort stands upon our official Blue Books pooh-poohed by the one party in the transaction which calls itself Christian ? We have been imperturbably deaf to these suggestions ; and now it would seem as though the Chinese Government were about to enter upon a policy of calculated competition. Our Indian Revenue is already suffering, and will probably suffer in the end as gravely as if the Chinese proposal had been accepted, and due consideration had been shown for the welfare of the Chinese people. IS THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT INSINCERE ? The defenders of our Anglo-Indian Policy sometimes seek to excuse this big blot on our fame by casting reflections upon the sincerity of the Chinese Government. “These cunning and un- scrupulous statesmen,” it is said, “ affect a virtue for which they have no genuine care.” Well, we have done our best to corrupt the sincerity of the Chinese rulers, and it ill becomes us to say much about the mote in our brother’s eye. “ Come, cast in thy lot with us; let us have one purse,” has been the language of every plenipotentiary we have sent to Peking. We clutch nine-tenths of the spoil, leaving China to nurse its own sick and bury its dead, and then impeach its good faith forsooth, because it is not in love with the dishonourable compact. I know too well that not a few Chinese officials are weak and covetous, but I believe there is a wide margin between the venal temper of the very worst of them and calculated insincerity. Many a Chinese mandarin would make what he could for his private purse by conniving at the traffic if the chance came in his way, and yet honestly condemn the toleration of the opium-trade by the government of which he is a servant. The Imperial Government has given sufficient proof of its good faith by refraining from all serious competition with us in this nefarious traffic for more than half a century, and if within the last few years the growth of opium is being fostered in China, it is only because our continued heedlessness to its appeals, combined with the disintegrating influence of our immoral example, A Study in Anglo-Indian Ethics. 3i has made the Chinese Executive hesitate for a moment about the financial wisdom of its past traditions. China is just on the point of being swept from its high moral vantage-ground by the momentum of our fifty years’ misdemeanours. I tremble to think what the consequence will be if the Court of Peking should lend itself to a deliberate and scientific scheme for the cultivation of the poppy as an offset to our monopoly in India. This ancient and widely-extended and estimable race may go down before the war of tariffs, and a century hence a few shrivelled yellow-skins, the remnant of a proud, skilful, cultivated people, may be crouching under the walls of huge untenanted cities, and stifling into oblivion, with languid opium-whiffs, the last fluttering pulses of a sublime national life and civilisation. WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE. Can nothing be done to repair the past ? If we would under- take to suppress the Indian growth, China would doubtless still be glad to carry out its own proposal, and give due guarantees for the suppression of the poppy in the various parts of its own territory where it is now growing. But whether it is possible to arrest the mischief of the past or not, our course is clear, if we admit that elementary morals have any obligation in international affairs. What supreme irony to call ourselves a Christian nation and establish a Christian Church, and to deliberately give ourselves to this practical negation of Christian morals upon the most colossal scale the world has seen ! Under no flag of Christendom is any- thing going on that will match our opium trade in infamy and utter shamelessness. It is incalculably worse than the Portugese trade in coolies against which we were so much’ agitated some years back. People who sing “ Rule Britannia ” think that the old dame on her chariot wheel is half an angel. What wrongs she has avenged ! What bloodshed she has stopped ! What slaves she has freed ! What holy causes she has chivalrously championed ! To some of us who have lived in China and seen the other side of her character, she seems more like the wrinkled hag who keeps a baby-farm, administers Godfrey’s Cordial, and shows a ghoulish death-bill. HOW ABOUT THE REVENUE ? But the question is ever being asked : “ How are we to replace the opium revenue in India if we decide to repent ? ” Three millions sterling* are not easy to find. That question should be relegated to our statesmen. It is possible that India would be just as well governed and her masses would be more contented if British officials were less extravagantly paid. Not long ago Mr. Ruskin said in one of his lectures : — “ Every mutiny, every danger, every terror, and every crime occurring under or paralysing our Indian legislation, arises directly * The net revenue derived by the Indian Government from the export trade in Opium is estimated, in the Budget Statement for 1892-3, at 5,400,000 tens of rupees, equivalent, with the exchange value of the rupee at is. 3d., to ^3,275,000 sterling. 32 The Poppy Harvest. out of our national desire to live on the loot of India, and the notion of English young gentlemen and ladies of good position, falling in love with each other without immediate prospect of establishment in Belgrave-square, that they can find in India, in- stantly on landing, a bungalow ready furnished with the loveliest fans, china, and shawls, ices and sherbet at command, four-and- twenty slaves succeeding each other hourly to swing the punkah, and a regiment with a beautiful band to ‘ keep order ’ outside all round the house.” How much longer must the honour of our name and every principle of our faith and philanthropy be sacrificed to the Moloch of a luxurious Anglo-Indian officialdom ? THE TRAFFIC INJURIOUS TO LEGITIMATE COMMERCE. This ill-omened traffic is an injury to every form of legitimate commerce, and predisposes the Chinese to dislike even the Science and Civilisation we represent. Not only does the trade impoverish the Chinese in many ways, and disqualify them from becoming our customers on any adequate scale, but the tradition of the past leads them to oppose the extension of a trade of which this evil thing is the most conspicuous item. Sentiment plays a much more important part in our international commerce than some people suppose. The feeling engendered amongst all the right-minded people of the eighteen provinces, is one of unanimous and unappeasable bitterness against Great Britain. The purest patriots of the country are against us. THE GREATEST HINDRANCE TO THE SPREAD OF CHRISTIANITY. It is this, too, which is the chief obstacle to the spread of the Christian faith. The Chinese bring it as their grand argument against the missionaries. They have little to object to in our theoretical ethics. Attacks upon idolatry do not provoke any very 3 serious reply. The one taunt heard day by day in the preaching rooms is “ How about the opium trade ? ” A religion that leads its professors to deal after such a fashion with a friendly nation, n it is assumed, cannot have much moral virtue in it. Our con- secration of life, property, strength to the conversion of the Chinese millions is largely neutralised by this unrepented national crime.” “ Leave there thy gift before the altar and go thy way : first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift.” Wipe out this cruel, long-fretting, virulent offence, and your missionary offerings shall have upon them the sign of a gracious acceptance they have hitherto lacked. How can we expect our witness to “ the blood of sprinkling that speaketh better things ” to be heard, whilst the blood of the daily-slaughtered Abel cries daily against us from the ground.? BRUMBY AND CLARKE, PROSPECT STREET, HULL.