[216] Spectator, Feb. 12, 1853.
[217] The net revenue from the opium trade, for the current year, is stated to be no less than four millions of pounds sterling, or nearly twenty millions of dollars; and it is to that revenue, says The Friend of India, Nov. 25, 1852, that the Indian government has been indebted for its power to carry on the wars since 1838, those of Affghanistan, Seinde, Gwalior, the Punjab, and that now existing with Burmah. Well is it asked by Dr. Allen, in his pamphlet on "The Opium Trade," (Lowell, 1853,) "Can such an unrighteous course in a nation always prosper?" "How," says the same author, "can the Chinese
"Regard the English in any other light than wholesale smugglers and wholesale dealers in poison? The latter can expend annually over two millions of dollars on the coast of Great Britain to protect its own revenue laws, but at the same time set at bold defiance similar laws of protection enacted by the former. The English are constantly supplying the Chinese a deadly poison, with which thousands yearly put an end to their existence. In England, even the druggists are expressly forbidden to sell arsenic, laudanum, or other poison, if they have the least suspicion that their customer intends to commit suicide. But in China every facility is afforded and material supplied under the British flag, and sanctioned by Parliament itself, for wholesale slaughter. How long will an enlightened and Christian nation continue to farm and grow a means of vice, with the proceeds of which, even when in her possession, a benighted and pagan nation disdains to replenish her treasury, being drawn from the ruin and misery of her people? Where is the consistency or humanity of a nation supporting armed vessels on the coast of Africa to intercept and rescue a few hundreds of her sons from a foreign bondage, when, at the same time, she is forging chains to hold millions on the coast of China in a far more hopeless bondage? And what must the world think of the religion of a nation that consecrates churches, ordains ministers of the gospel, and sends abroad missionaries of the cross, while, in the mean time, it encourages and upholds a vice which is daily inflicting misery and death upon more than four millions of heathen? And what must be the verdict of future generations, as they peruse the history of these wrongs and outrages? Will not the page of history, which now records £20,000,000 as consecrated on the altar of humanity to emancipate 800,000 slaves, lose all its splendour and become positively odious, when it shall be known that this very money was obtained from the proceeds of a contraband traffic on the shores of a weak and defenceless heathen empire, at the sacrifice, too, of millions upon millions of lives?"