Only last year a treaty was entered into between the United States and China, and one of the articles of that treaty distinctly stated that the opium trade was forbidden, and that no American ship should become an opium trader—a fact which showed that the Chinese authorities were honest in their expressed desire to put an end to the trade.
Sir J. W. Pease is the most confiding of men; to my mind the treaty should be construed in a very different sense. Sometimes, when we want to convey our sentiments to another, we do so indirectly. There is a very well understood method of attaining that object. Instead of opening your mind to Mr. Jones, who is the object of your intended edification, you will in Mr. Jones’s presence address your remarks to Mr. Brown; but in reality, although you are speaking to the latter, you are speaking at the former. Now the whole object of this precious article of the treaty was to play a similar piece of finesse. Both nations well understood what they were about; they were simply trying to hoodwink and make fools of John Bull by putting into the treaty this false and hypocritical clause, which, as between themselves, each party well knew meant nothing to the other. Here is Sir J. W. Pease, a sensible and astute man of business, with his eyes open, yet, blinded by his good nature and anti-opium prejudice, falling into the trap set for him, and allowing himself to be deceived by this transparent piece of humbug, and quoting in the House of Commons this “bogus” treaty as evidence that the Indo-China opium trade is so infamous that the American Government intended, so far as they were concerned, to put a stop to it, and that the Chinese Government wish to abolish it on moral grounds. I give you this as an example of the lengths to which otherwise sensible gentlemen will go when smitten with opium-phobia, and how oblivious they become under such circumstances to actual facts. Imagine how his Excellency Li Hung Chang, that very able Chinese statesman, and those smart American diplomatists who have thus posed as anti-opium philanthropists, must have enjoyed the fun of being able to so completely bamboozle an English member of Sir J. W. Pease’s reputation!
Now, although I have exposed this Americo-Chinese juggle, I am far from meaning to cast the slightest imputation upon Sir J. W. Pease, whose personal character I in common with the whole country hold in the very highest respect. I am well assured that in bringing forward his motion in the House of Commons he was actuated by a sense of duty, and the very purest motives, and that in referring to the treaty in question he fully believed in its bona fides; upon this point I am at one with his warmest admirers. No one deservedly stands higher as a philanthropist and Christian gentleman, and, save as regards this opium delusion, no man has ever made a nobler use of an ample fortune than he.
I may speak in the same terms of the venerable and universally-respected nobleman who is the president of the Anti-Opium Society, whose whole life has been devoted to the welfare of his fellow men, especially those who stood most in need of his help. I referred in the first edition of this lecture to a Most Reverend Prelate, honoured and beloved both by his own countrymen, and, I believe, the whole Christian world, who is also, I deeply deplore, a believer in the anti-opium delusion, but in doing so nothing was farther from my intentions than to lay aside for a moment the respect that was due to him as a man and a high dignitary of the church. I revere and honour him and admire his great and noble qualities as much as any man living. Born and brought up as I have been in the Church of England, and sincerely attached to its doctrine and teaching, having near and dear relatives, too, ministers of that church, the last thing I would be capable of doing is to harbour an unkind thought, or utter a disrespectful word, against any of her clergy, much less one of her most honoured prelates. These three good and upright men are, I am sorry to say, but types of a great many other most estimable people, many of them ornaments to their country, who through the purity and overflowing goodness of their hearts, have been dragged into the vortex of delusion set afloat by the Anti-Opium Society—who allow themselves to be cajoled and victimised—led by the nose, in fact, by anti-opium fanatics, who, cunning as the madman and perfectly regardless of the means they resort to in the prosecution of what they consider right, bring to their aid the zeal of the missionary and the power for mischief which superior education and mis-directed talents confer. This is what rouses one’s indignation and compels me to pursue the unpleasant task of discrediting and otherwise painfully referring to men whom, apart from this wretched opium delusion, I honour and respect.
Upon this point I cannot refrain from referring to a gentleman of high standing, who had formerly been in China, and really ought to have known better. That gentleman went so far as to write a letter to the “Times,” in which he said that out of one hundred missionaries in China there was not one who would receive a convert into his church until he had made a vow against opium smoking. Bearing in mind that all these so-called converts made by these one hundred missionaries belong for the most part to the very poor, if not to the dregs of the people, I should think no missionary clergyman would find much difficulty in obtaining such a pledge. He has only to ask and to have. If a clergyman in a very poor neighbourhood in the East End of London proposed to his congregation that they should promise never to drink champagne, he would receive such a pledge without difficulty from one and all; but if any kind person were afterwards to give them a banquet of roast beef and plum-pudding, with plenty of champagne to wash those good things down, I am afraid their vow would be found to be very elastic.
So it is with the congregations of these missionary clergymen; there is not an individual amongst them who would refuse to enjoy the opium pipe if he got the chance, however much they might declaim against the practice to please the missionary. Opium, as the missionaries must well know, is a luxury that can only be indulged in by those who have the means of paying for it. Now, while twopence or threepence may appear to us a very insignificant sum, such will not be the opinion of a very poor person. Threepence will purchase a loaf of bread. So it is with the Chinese, especially those residing in their own territory. There is only one class of coin current in China. It is known by Europeans as “cash.” Ten should equal a cent, or a halfpenny, but owing to the inferiority of the metal they are made of, twelve or thirteen usually go to make one cent of English money, so that ten cents, or fivepence of our money, would be about one hundred and thirty cash. A poor Chinaman possessing that sum would think that he had got hold of quite a pocketful of money, and so it would prove, so far as regards a little rice or salt fish, which forms part of most Chinamen’s daily food; but were he so foolish as to indulge in opium, a few whiffs of the pipe would soon swallow up the whole. And then there arises the difficulty of getting the cash, so that it is really only people having command of a fair amount of money who can afford to indulge, habitually at all events, in the luxury of the pipe.
Now with respect to the alleged evil effects of opium smoking, you will constantly hear stories from missionary sources of wretched people, the slaves of the opium pipe, crawling to the medical officers of missionary hospitals, who are to a certain extent missionaries themselves, and asking to be cured of the terrible consequences of their indulgence in opium smoking. The medical officer at each of these missionary institutions, a victim himself, in most cases, to the delusions set afloat, accepts their story, pities the men, and takes them into the hospital; and, believing that if they do not get a moderate indulgence in opium smoking they will pine away and die, the good, easy man, full of kindness and simplicity, gives them a liberal allowance, which his patients are delighted to get. Knowing the bent of mind of the confiding doctor, they fill him with all kinds of falsehoods as to the evils attendant upon opium smoking in general, which he swallows without a particle of doubt. The truth, however, is that those men who go with such tales to the medical missionary are in most, if not all, cases simply impostors, generally broken-down thieves, sneaks, and scoundrels—the very scum of the people. No longer having energy even to steal, they are driven off by their old associates, to starve or die in a gaol. These men are the craftiest, the meanest, and the most unscrupulous on the face of the globe. They well know all that the missionaries think about opium smoking, and, like the accommodating Mr. Jingle, they have a hundred stories of the same kind ready to pour into the ears of their kind-hearted benefactors, who become in turn their victims. Much merriment, I have no doubt, these scamps indulge in amongst themselves at the good doctor’s expense; for the Chinese are not deficient in humour, and have a keen sense of the ludicrous. These people crawl to one of the hospitals; the doctor is delighted with their stories, for they confirm all he has written home or published, perhaps in The Friend of China. He communicates with the missionary; their stories are sent home, and the patients get for three or four weeks excellent food and comforts, including plenty of opium, before they are turned out as cured. The lepers have been cleansed and made whole, but only to enable them to prey once more upon the industrious community. I may here observe that there are no missionary hospitals in Hong Kong, and so we never hear of those wonderful stories happening in that place, yet, if such stories were true, it is there that the strongest corroboration of them should be found, for, although there is no missionary hospital in the colony, there is the large and well-managed civil hospital, as also the Chinese Tung-Wah Hospital, both of which are subject to the inspection of Dr. Ayres.
Such are the tales, and such the authors who have caused much of this clamour about opium smoking. There is scarcely a particle of truth in any one of those stories. No man can indulge in opium to such an extent as to harm himself unless he possesses a fair income, and if such a person became ill from over-indulgence, he would not go to a foreign hospital, but would send for a doctor to treat him at his own house. It is only the broken-down pauper, thief, or beggar, who, in his last extremity, seeks admission to the hospital.
Dr. Ayres was the first to expose this imposture. On arriving at Hong Kong he found it had been the custom there to allow such of the prisoners in the gaol as were heavy smokers a modicum of prepared opium daily,—it having been supposed by his predecessors that without it such prisoners would pine away and die. Dr. Ayres, however, knew better; and he at once put an end to the custom. He would not allow one grain of opium or other stimulant to be given to any prisoner, however advanced a smoker he might be. The result was that the hitherto pampered prisoners moaned and groaned, pretending, no doubt, to be very ill; but after a little time they got quite well. The Doctor has published his experiences on this subject in the Friend of China.
These persons know what pleases the missionaries, and so they detail to them all kinds of horrible stories respecting opium smoking, which, as I have before stated, are pure inventions. Trust a Chinaman to invent a plausible tale when it suits his purpose to do so. The missionaries do not smoke opium themselves, and have, therefore, no means of refuting the falsehoods thus related to them, or of testing their accuracy. They simply believe all these stories, and send them on to head-quarters in London, to be retailed by eloquent tongues at Exeter Hall and elsewhere. I have no doubt that every mail brings home numbers of apparently highly authenticated tales of this kind, every one of which is baseless. Thanks to the modern excursion agents, and to the present facilities for travelling, gentlemen can easily take a trip to China, and if any of them happen to have opium on the brain, they will take letters of introduction to missionary clergymen. On their arrival at Hong Kong they will perhaps be shown over the Tung-Wah hospital, where they see a number of wretched objects labouring under all kinds of diseases; they will go away fully impressed with the belief that all the patients shown to them are victims of opium smoking. They are then taken to an opium shop, or as the missionaries like to call it, an “opium den”—though why an opium-smoking shop should be so termed, and a dram shop in London called a “gin palace,” I cannot understand—and are there shown half a dozen dirty-looking men, mostly thieves and blackguards, all smoking opium, and as they are quiet and motionless, they come to the conclusion that they are all in a dying state, having but a few days more to live. If they knew the facts, they would find perhaps that the very men they were commiserating were just then quietly planning a burglary or some piratical expedition for that very night. These kind of travellers go out to China with preconceived notions, and are quite prepared to believe anything and everything, however absurd or monstrous, about opium smoking. They will spend two days at Hong Kong, three at Canton, two or three at Shanghai. They will take copious notes at these places, omitting nothing, however incredible or absurd, that is told them, and return home with a full conviction that they have “done China,” when in reality they have only done themselves, and that, too, most completely. If they have the cacoethes scribendi strong upon them, they will probably write a book upon the subject; and so the miserable delusion is kept up.