"Now, let the people of England mark one thing. The cholera originates in the East. It has visited us once, and is on its march once more toward us. We have heard through the newspapers of its arrival in Syria, in Turkey, in Russia, at Vienna. In a few months it will probably be again among us.
"Has any one yet imagined that this scourge may possibly be the instrument of Divine retribution for our crimes and cruelties? Has any one imagined that we have any thing to do with the creation of this terrible pestilence? Yet there is little, there is scarcely the least doubt, that this awful instrument of death is occasioned by this very monopoly of salt—that it is the direct work of the four-and-twenty men in Leadenhall-street. The cholera is found to arise in the very centre of India. It commences in the midst of this swarming population, which subsists on vegetables, and which is deprived by the British government of the necessary salt! In that hot climate it acquires a deadly strength—thousands perish by it as by the stroke of lightning, and it hence radiates over the globe, travelling at the speed of a horse in full gallop. Thus it is that God visits our deeds upon our heads.
"Such is a brief glance at the mal-administration, the abuse, and the murderous treatment of India, permitted by great and Christian England to a knot of mere money-making traders. We commit the lives and happiness of one hundred and fifty millions of souls—the well-being, and probably the chance of retention, of one of the finest countries in the world, and the comfort and prosperity of every human creature in Great Britain, to the hands of those who are only, from day to day, grasping at the vitals of this glorious Eastern region to increase their dividends. This is bad enough, but this is not all. As if we had given them a charter in the most effectual manner to damage our dominions and blast all our prospects of trade, we have allowed these four-and-twenty men of Leadenhall-street not only to cripple India, but to exasperate and, as far as possible, close China against us. Two millions of people in India and three millions of people in China—all waiting for our manufactures, all capable of sending us the comforts and necessaries that we need—it would seem that to us, a nation especially devoted to trade, as if Providence had opened all the gorgeous and populous East to employ and to enrich us. One would have thought that every care and anxiety would have been aroused to put ourselves on the best footing with this swarming region. It has been the last thing thought of.
"The men of Leadenhall-street have been permitted, after having paralyzed India, to send to China not the articles that the Chinese wanted, but the very thing of all others that its authorities abhorred—that is, opium.
"It is well known with what assiduity these traders for years thrust this deadly drug into the ports of China; or it may be known from 'Medhurst's China,' from 'Thelwall's Iniquities of the Opium Trade,' from 'Montgomery Martin's Opium in China,' and various other works. It is well known what horrors, crimes, ruin of families, and destruction of individuals the rage of opium-smoking introduced among the millions of the Celestial Empire. Every horror, every species of reckless desperation, social depravity, and sensual crime, spread from the practice and overran China as a plague. The rulers attempted to stop the evil by every means in their power. They enacted the severest punishments for the sale of it. These did not avail. They augmented the punishment to death. Without a stop to it the whole framework of society threatened to go to pieces. 'Opium,' says the Imperial edict itself, 'coming from the distant regions of barbarians, has pervaded the country with its baneful influence.' The opium-smoker would steal, sell his property, his children, the mother of his children, and finally commit murder for it. The most ghastly spectacles were everywhere seen; instead of healthy and happy men, the most repulsive scenes. 'I visited one of the opium-houses,' said an individual quoted by Sir Robert Inglis, in the House of Commons, in 1843, 'and shall I tell you what I saw in this antechamber of hell? I thought it impossible to find anything worse than the results of drinking ardent spirits; but I have succeeded in finding something far worse. I saw Malays, Chinese, men and women, old and young, in one mass, in one common herd, wallowing in their filth, beastly, sensual, devilish, and this under the eyes of a Christian government.'
"They were these abominations and horrors that the Emperor of China determined to arrest. They were these which our East India Company determined to perpetuate for this base gain. When the emperor was asked to license the sale of opium, as he could not effect its exclusion, and thus make a profit of it, what was his reply? 'It is true I cannot prevent the introduction of the flowing poison. Gain-seeking and corrupt men will, for profit and sensuality, defeat my wishes, but nothing will induce me to derive a benefit from the vice and misery of my people.'
"These were the sentiments of the Chinese monarch; what was the conduct of the so-called Christian Englishmen? They determined to go on poisoning and demoralizing China, till they provoked the government to war, and then massacred the people to compel the continuance of the sale of opium."
Howitt evidently has as ardent a sympathy for those who have suffered from the tyranny of British rule as Edmund Burke himself. The wholesale degradation of the Hindoos, which has resulted from the measures of the East India Company, calls loudly indeed for the denunciations of indignant humanity. The crime must have its punishment. The ill-gotten gains of the Company should be seized to carry out an ameliorating policy, and all concerned in enforcing the system of oppression should be taught that justice is not to be wounded with impunity.
The burdens imposed upon the Hindoos are precisely of the character and extent of those that have reduced Ireland to poverty and her people to slavery. Besides the enormous rents, which are sufficient of themselves to dishearten the tillers of the soil, the British authorities seem to have exhausted invention in devising taxes. So dear a price to live was never paid by any people except the Irish. What remains to the cultivator when the rent of the land and almost forty different taxes are paid?
Those Hindoos who wish to employ capital or labour in any other way than in cultivation of land are deterred by the formidable array of taxation. The chief taxes are styled the Veesabuddy, or tax on merchants, traders, and shopkeepers; the Mohturfa, or tax on weavers, carpenters, stonecutters, and other mechanical trades; and the Bazeebab, consisting of smaller taxes annually rented out to the highest bidder. The proprietor of the Bazeebab is thus constituted a petty chieftain, with power to exact fees at marriages and religious ceremonies; to inquire into and fine the misconduct of females in families, and other misdemeanours—in fact, petty tyrants, who can at all times allege engagements to the government to justify extortion. [113] These proprietors are the worst kind of slaveholders.