Mr. Gladstone.—“How long ago have you told him that you were sure the thing could not go on?”
Mr. Inglis.—“For four or five years past.”
Chairman.—“What gave you that impression?”
Mr. Inglis.—“An immense quantity of opium being forced upon the Chinese every year, and that in its turn forcing it up the coast in our vessels.”
Chairman.—“When you use the words ‘forcing it upon them,’ do you mean that they were not voluntary purchasers?”
Mr. Inglis.—“No, but the East India Company were increasing the quantity of opium almost every year, without reference to the demand in China; that is to say, there was always an immense supply of opium in China, and the company still kept increasing the quantity at lower prices.”
Three years later, just after the war, Sir George Staunton, speaking from experience as a British official in the East, said in the House of Commons, “I never denied the fact that if there had been no opium smuggling there would have been no war.
“Even if the opium habit had been permitted to run its natural course, if it had not received an extraordinary impulse from the measures taken by the East India Company to promote its growth, which almost quadrupled the supply, I believe it would never have created that extraordinary alarm in the Chinese authorities which betrayed them into the adoption of a sort of coup d’ etât for its suppression.”
Sir William Muir, some time lieutenant-governor of the Northwest Provinces of India, is on record thus: “By increasing its supply of ‘provision’ opium, it (the Bengal government) has repeatedly caused a glut in the Chinese market, a collapse of prices in India, an extensive bankruptcy and misery in Malwa.”
The most interesting summing-up of the whole question I have seen is from the pen of Sir Arthur Cotton, who wrote after sixty years’ experience in Indian affairs, protesting against “continuing this trading upon the sins and miseries of the greatest nation in the world in respect of population, on the ground of our needing the money.”