A Vindication of England's Policy with Regard to the Opium Trade

by Charles Reginald Haines

As to the effects upon Indian commerce of a large diminution of the opium trade, India would lose her present large profits on a product of which she owns a natural monopoly. She would also be obliged to increase her exports largely, the value of which would consequently be depreciated; except that the Indian tea-trade would be benefited by a disturbance of the China trade. Further, India would be forced to reduce her imports, however necessary these may be. Lastly, there is a prospect of a fall in the rate of exchange, and a further depreciation of silver, which would increase her liabilities and imperil her financial position.

Such, then, are the difficulties which are inseparably connected with any sudden cessation of the opium trade; but it remains for us still to notice one proposal emanating from the supporters of the anti-opium policy, which is remarkable for its naïveté. It recommends that England should demand from China other privileges as an equivalent for the renunciation of a formal right, and as an indemnification of a great loss sustained. This equivalent would no doubt take the shape of commercial concessions, such as the opening up of the interior of China to foreign intercourse, the working of the mines in China, which are numerous and valuable, and the construction and working of railways by English engineers. There is no doubt that China offers a large and virgin field to the commercial activity of England, and the result that followed the opening of ports after our two wars with China are sufficiently remarkable. By the first treaty we gained a trade of £2,000,000; by the second of £3,500,000 annually. In our commercial dealings with the Chinese we have to deal not only with “the obstructive policy of the mandarins, but also the passive and unconscious resistance of a people of stagnant ideas, of very limited enterprise, and possessing only primitive means of inter-communication.”[132] For a further development of our commercial intercourse, Medhurst goes on to say, two things are wanting:—1st, access to new markets by having new ports opened and by procuring a right to navigate inland waters, and to improve the means of communication; 2nd, a full and frank acknowledgment by the Chinese at all the ports of the right of foreign goods to be covered and protected from inland dues by transit passes. Some such concessions the anti-opiumists would have us demand; but these benevolent protestors against forcing the Chinese forget that concessions of this kind, wrung from an unwilling people, would be far more galling than any importation of opium, which it is quite clear, even to them, that they need not buy if they do not wish it. Moreover, the important point seems to have been overlooked, that India would lose her revenue, while the gain from increased intercourse would be wholly on the side of England. As it is, the native community in India can hardly believe that there is not a selfish motive at the bottom of this agitation in England, and, should this last proposal be carried out, we could hardly blame them if they pointed to this as a proof that their suspicions were well founded.

We may here briefly notice[133] Li Hung Chang’s latest proposal, that he should farm or purchase the monopoly of all the Indian opium; with the intention, he would no doubt himself say, of getting the control of the trade into his own hands, and limiting the import, just as on a previous occasion, in a communication to the Anglo-Opium Society, he asserted that the only object of the Chinese authorities in taxing opium was in the past, as it would be in the future, the desire to repress the traffic.

Considering, then, the sudden abolition of the opium traffic as practically out of the question, and leaving out of sight the undoubtedly possible, though not likely, gradual cessation of the trade between India and China owing to the competition of the native drug, it only remains for us to propose some practical solution of the difficulty, some less heroic method of removing this rock of offence that has so divided the current of English feeling. If we reject the total suppression theory, there are, as it seems, two alternatives, and two only, left to us. We may on the one hand follow the sensible and statesman-like recommendation of Sir Rutherford Alcock in 1869. With a view to test the sincerity of the Chinese Government, and their power to prohibit the growth of the poppy in their own dominions, that experienced Minister proposed, in a Convention which the Chinese seem disposed to ratify, that they should receive an increased duty on opium imported, “and moreover be allowed to test their power and will to limit or diminish the hitherto unchecked production of opium in their own provinces by an understanding with the Indian Government during a certain period not to extend the production in India; and if the Chinese Government kept faith and showed the power greatly to diminish, and more or less rapidly stop, the culture of the poppy altogether, the Indian Government would then, pari passu, consider how far they could further co-operate by diminishing their own area of culture, having time to substitute other crops and industries to take its place.”

The effects of this arrangement, if carried out, would be clearly the same as those arising from a gradual cessation of the trade through competition with native opium. The cultivation in India would have time to change without serious injury to the growers of the poppy, and trade would by degrees adapt itself to the altered conditions; but the same results would follow, as in the other case, though not to anything like the same extent. The loss of revenue would still be great, but the general growth of other branches of income would be more likely, if any sudden displacement of industry or capital were avoided. But we can hardly escape the conviction that the Chinese would show themselves as unable or as unwilling to stop the cultivation in China, no less than the import from India, as they have ever been. In fact, the lofty utterance of Taou Kwang notwithstanding, the Chinese authorities are very glad to draw a revenue even from the vices of their people, and they would be very reluctant, not to say quite averse, to sacrifice a revenue now amounting to more than two millions. What they do want is to obtain a larger share in the profits arising from the sale of the Indian drug. Let those who believe in the “child-like simplicity”[134] of the Chinese pin their faith to such assertions as that of Li Hung Chang quoted above, that the only aim of the Chinese Government in taxing opium is to limit the import, and that their only object in allowing and even encouraging the native growth is to drive out the foreign drug, and, when they have in this way obtained the command of the market, to suppress the cultivation altogether. This air of injured innocence is remarkably effective with some people; but the exquisite plausibility and adroitness of these and other similar pleas must not blind us to their inherent falsity. Li Hung Chang can no more prevent the Chinese from consuming opium than we can prevent our countrymen from drinking wine and spirits and smoking tobacco by mere legislative enactments, and it would be considered a remarkable method for attaining this desirable end if the distillation of spirits were made as free and unrestrained as the brewing of beer.

Lastly—and this would have the advantage of satisfying the only just plea urged by the “Society,”—we might proclaim to China in unmistakeable terms that she was free to carry out her own fiscal policy as suited her best, with regard to opium as well as all other imports. Not that we are disposed to allow that this is an international duty, unless it be an international duty also to free China from all the conditions we have forced upon her: unless we are ready, for example, to cede Hongkong, to let the Chinese close their ports if they feel inclined, to give up our missionaries to the tender mercies of Chinese fanaticism, or forbid them to set foot within the Celestial Empire.

The ratification of the Chefoo Convention would be a step in this direction, and may well be tried as a temporary measure, though it is manifestly unfair to say that we are guilty of any breach of faith in regard to this convention.[135]

We have now to consider what would be the result of such a policy to India. China would no doubt take advantage of her freedom, and tax Indian opium as heavily as it would bear, and in this way transfer to herself some of the profits which now go to India; but, on the other hand, she would be unwilling to place a prohibitive tariff upon it, knowing, as she well does, that none the less would it enter China by being smuggled in, and the revenue which should go into the imperial coffers would be paid, as before, to the officials in the shape of bribes. India would certainly not lose all its revenue; for a considerable part, one-seventh at least, goes to the Straits Settlements and the neighbouring islands, to the Netherlands of India, to Hongkong for export to the islands of the Pacific, and to California. Moreover, Indian opium has a monopoly value, and is, besides, superior in flavour to all other opium—holds, in fact, that place among the various kinds of the drug which champagne holds among wines. So that, on the whole, this policy, which would strike at the very root of the anti-opium agitation, would not, as it seems, have any very alarming effects upon India.

And now we have done. We have tried to point out the fallacy of the principal arguments urged by the Anti-Opium Society against the traffic, and the injustice and dangers involved in the remedies which they propose. But we have not hesitated to acknowlege it when their objections seemed well-founded. Their opinions, it need not be said, have undergone considerable modification since the days of Earl Shaftesbury’s memorial; and it is by no means clear yet what the actual policy advocated by a majority of their supporters is. “Some shout one thing and some another, and the greater part know not wherefore they have been called together.” And though we have condemned their measures, we must not be thought to be condemning the men. They, we freely admit, are actuated by the highest and noblest motives of benevolence and philanthropy; but in their sensibility to the sufferings of others, they are apt to disregard the justice due to their own countrymen. If one half of the allegations of the missionaries and their supporters could be accepted as true, and brought home to the intelligence of the nation, there would not be a voice raised for the traffic. The cry would not indeed be “Perish India,” but “Perish the opium revenue,” at whatever cost to England. The very rejection of these extreme opinions by a large majority of those who, from their position and experience, are best qualified to form a judgment on the question, is in itself a strong argument against their truth; and if not true, how pernicious must be the effect of their dissemination! Here is what an Englishman of ability and experience, for many years resident in Hongkong, says: “I say that the missionaries and the Anti-Opium Society, in the course of their agitation for the abolition of the Indo-Chinese opium trade, are vilifying their countrymen and blackening their country in the eyes of the whole world, so that the foreigner can convict us out of our own mouths, and gibe at us for hypocrisy and turpitude, which we are wholly innocent of, and for crimes we have never committed.”

But making every allowance for the loftiness of their motives and the sincerity of their opinions, we must take grievous exception to some of their methods of propagandism. Among the numerous pamphlets and tracts published by the society is one called Poppies: a Talk with Boys and Girls, of which the reviewer in the Friend of China[136] says himself: “To acknowledge our sins and the sins of our fathers to ourselves, and in the face of the world, is painful and humiliating enough; but to tell our children that England is not the brave, generous, Christian country, foremost of the nations in the cause of liberty and religion all the world over, which we should like them to think her, but, on the contrary, capable of the meanness, hypocrisy, greed, and cruelty of our treatment of China, is a bitter task.” Bitter, indeed! and what if it be wholly unjustifiable? There is no high-minded Englishman but will utterly resent and protest against this poisoning of the minds of our children with delusive and exaggerated statements, and thus prejudicing them on a subject which they are not yet of an age to form a fair judgment about.