A Chinaman, therefore, will never tell the amount or value of his property, or the profits he is making by his business. He fears being plundered; that is the simple fact. I know a respectable man in Hong Kong, the possessor of considerable house property there, a man who would be called wealthy even in England. Some years ago, when at Canton, where he had a house, a Mandarin suddenly arrested and put him into prison. What a Chinese prison is you will find in Dr. Gray’s book. It is not the place where a paternal Government ought to house the worst of criminals, or even a wild beast. The man had committed no crime, and had done nothing whatever to warrant this treatment; in vain he asked what he had been imprisoned for, and demanded to be confronted with his accusers, if there were any. His gaolers shrugged their shoulders and gave him no answer. He was kept there for two or three months. Ultimately he received a hint, which he recognized as an official intimation, that unless he came down handsomely, as the phrase is, and that speedily, he would lose his head. He took the hint, made the best bargain he could, and ultimately had to pay seventy thousand dollars, or about fourteen thousand pounds, for his release. There never was any accusation brought against him.
I knew another man, living at Swatow, who had made a great deal of money in trade. He bought a large piece of foreshore at that place, which he reclaimed and turned into profitable land. A military Mandarin living there thought him a fair object for a squeeze; the same process was gone through as in the case I have before mentioned; but this man, not having the same wisdom as the other, held fast to his dollars. The result was that a false charge of kidnapping, alleged to have been committed twenty years before, was brought against him, and he was taken out and beheaded. That is the way money is raised by the governors and their subordinates in China. So much for Mr. Turner’s benign and paternal Government. There is no regular Income Tax in China, but there is a Property Tax levied in the way I have mentioned. The Chinese authorities will let a man go on making money for many years, and when they think he has accumulated sufficient wealth for their purpose, they pounce down upon him and demand as much as they think they can extort. That is the reason the Chinese opium dealers are so reticent when inquiries are made concerning opium. If the Commissioners at the Treaty Ports had got fair returns, I have no doubt that it is not a hundred thousand pikuls of native opium that Sir Robert Hart would have estimated as the quantity of opium grown in China, but probably four or five times that amount.
Here, again, I must quote from Mr. Spence’s report. Nothing can possibly show better the prevalence of opium smoking in the provinces of Szechuan and Yunnan and Hupah, they being about equal in extent to France, Spain, and Portugal. This is what he says on the prevalence of opium smoking in those provinces:—
Before giving an estimate of the amount of opium produced in Szechuan, I must refer, in explanation of the large figures I shall be obliged to use, to the extraordinary prevalence of the habit of opium smoking in Western Hupei, in Szechuan, and in Yunnan. It prevails to an extent undreamt of in other parts of China. The Roman Catholic missionaries, who are stationed all over Szechuan to the number of nearly one hundred, and who, living amongst the people, have opportunities of observation denied to travellers, estimate that one-tenth of the whole male adult population of the province smoke opium. Mr. Parker, after travelling all over the thickly-settled parts of the province, estimates the proportion of smokers thus:—
| Per cent. | ||
| Labourers and small farmers | 10 | |
| Small shopkeepers | 20 | |
| Hawkers, soldiers | 30 | |
| Merchants, gentry | 80 | |
| Officials and their staffs | 90 | |
| Actors, prostitutes, thieves, vagabonds | 95 |
I agree with Mr. Parker that the proportion of smokers varies in different classes according to their means and leisure, but I feel sure his estimate of the per-centage amongst the labouring classes is much too low. One of the most numerous class of labourers in China is the coolie class, day labourers who live by picking up odd jobs, turning their hands to any kind of unskilled work that may be offered. Certainly more than half of them smoke. Of the labouring classes who are not “coolies,” as a whole this much may be said—they only have money at stated intervals; and when out of a gang of forty or fifty workmen or sailors only four or five smoke opium, it does not mean that only ten per cent. are smokers. In all probability half of the whole gang squandered their wages the day they got the money, and have nothing left to buy opium or anything else until the job or voyage for which they have been engaged is finished.
For example, of my junk crew on my voyage to Chungking, only four smoked opium regularly, but seven others who had spent all their wages before we started smoked whenever I gave them a few cash. The total abstinence of a British sailor at sea for months on end proves nothing; it is what he will do when he has ten pounds in his pocket, and is in a street with fifteen public-houses, that decides his sobriety. So of workmen in the west of China, a large number smoke opium when they have money, and do the best they can when they have none. Whatever be the exact per-centage of the opium smokers in Szechuan in the whole population, it is many times larger than in the east.
Now, after all this absolutely irrefutable testimony, many might think it unnecessary to go further. They little know, however, how strong a hold fanaticism takes of the human mind; they little think how difficult it is to eradicate a fascinating LIE from the mind, once its glittering meretricious form has got hold of it and supplanted wholesome truth. I have, therefore, to deal not only with those whose minds are as a sheet of white paper, but with those in whom the fallacious seeds that beget error and fanaticism have been sown and taken firm root. I will now give you an extract from Sir Rutherford Alcock’s paper, which is deserving of careful study:—
I may say here, that although most of the staple arguments and misleading opinions on opium and its disastrous effects come from the missionaries in China, whose good faith I do not question, there is no stronger protest against exaggerated and sensational statements on record than has been supplied by one of their number, the late Dr. Medhurst, of whom it has been truly said, he was “one of the most able, experienced, zealous missionaries in China.” Opposed in principle to the opium trade in all its aspects, his statements will be readily accepted as unimpeachable evidence. The following remark appears in an official paper, forwarded to the Chief Superintendent of Trade of Hong Kong in 1855. Alluding to a speech of an American missionary who had visited England, and was reported to have told the British public “that the smokers of the contraband article have increased from eight to fifteen millions, yielding an annual death harvest of more than a million,” and further characterizing the traffic as “staining the British name in China with the deepest disgrace,” Dr. Medhurst observes, “such statements do great harm; they produce a fictitious and groundless excitement in the minds of the religious and philanthropic public at home, while they steel against all reasonable and moderate representations the minds of the political and mercantile body abroad. The estimate given has not even the semblance of truth; it is an outrageous exaggeration.” And yet in a memorial presented to Lord Clarendon by two distinguished and justly respected noblemen, the Earls of Shaftesbury and Chichester, on the extent of the opium trade in 1855, these, and still more “outrageous exaggerations” appear with the authority of their names. Lord Shaftesbury officializes the estimate that twenty millions of Chinese are opium smokers, and assumes that of this number one-tenth, that is, two millions, die yearly, and states it as “an appalling fact.” Appalling, indeed! But what if it be a mere figment of the imagination, and absolutely devoid, as Dr. Medhurst says, of a semblance of truth?
This is the way the benevolent British public have been cajoled and misled for the last twenty years, or more, by opium-phobists. No wonder that the Anti-Opium Society can raise fifty thousand pounds so easily, for the British public is a benevolent one, and will subscribe its gold readily where what they believe a proper object presents itself. Sad, indeed it is, that in the present case its munificence represents, not merely so much money lost, but vast sums recklessly squandered in a mischievous agitation, that whilst it tends to sap and ruin one of the loveliest of all virtues—that charity that endureth long and is kind—paralyses missionary labour, prejudices the trade and revenue of our great Indian Empire, and defames our country in the eyes of the whole world. Sad, sad also to see that venerated nobleman, Lord Shaftesbury, after his long and honourable career, and so many other good and eminent men, made the victims of such miserable delusions.