And so it is to-day. British India still holds the cream of the trade, for the Chinese grown opium cannot compete in quality with the Indian drug. The British Indian government raises the poppy in the rich Ganges Valley (more than six hundred thousand acres of poppies they raised there last year), manufactures it in government factories at Patna and Ghazipur—manufactures four-fifths of it especially to suit the Chinese taste, and sells it at annual government auctions in Calcutta.
The result of this traffic is so very grave that it is a difficult matter to discuss in moderate language. To the traveller who leaves the railroad and steamboat lines and ventures, in springless native cart or swaying mule litter, along the sunken roads and the hills of western and northwestern China, the havoc and misery wrought by the “white man’s smoke,” the “foreign dust,” becomes unpleasantly evident. Some hint of the meaning of it, a faint impression of the terrible devastation of this drug—let loose, as it has been, on a backward, poverty-stricken race—is seared, hour by hour and day by day into his brain.
A terrible drama is now being enacted in the Far East. The Chinese race is engaged in a fight to a finish with a drug—and the odds are on the drug.
II
THE GOLDEN OPIUM DAYS
In the splendid, golden days of the East India Company, the great Warren Hastings put himself on record in these frank words:
“Opium is a pernicious article of luxury, which ought not to be permitted but for the purpose of foreign commerce only.” The new traffic promised to solve the Indian fiscal problem, if skillfully managed; accordingly, the production and manufacture of opium was made a government monopoly. China, after all, was a long way off—and Chinamen were only Chinamen. That the East India Company might be loosing an uncontrollable monster not only on China but on the world hardly occurred to the great Warren Hastings—the British chickens might, a century later, come home to roost in Australia and South Africa was too remote a possibility even for speculative inquiry.
Now trade supports us, governs us, controls our dependencies, represents us at foreign courts, carries on our wars, signs our treaties of peace. Trade, like its symbol the dollar, is neither good nor bad; it has no patriotism, no morals, no humanity. Its logic applies with the same relentless force and precision to corn, cotton, rice, wheat, human slaves, oil, votes, opium. It is the power that drives human affairs; and its law is the law of the balance sheet. So long as any commodity remains in the currents of trade the law of trade must reign, the balance sheet must balance. It is difficult to get a commodity into these currents, but once you have got the commodity in, you will find it next to impossible to get it out. There has been more than one prime minister, I fancy, more than one secretary of state for India, who has wished the opium question in Jericho. It is not pleasant to answer the moral indignation of the British empire with the cynical statement that the India government cannot exist without that opium revenue. Why, oh, why, did not the great Warren Hastings develop the cotton rather than the opium industry! But the interesting fact is that he did not. He chose opium, and opium it is.