British Opium Policy, and Its Results to India and China

Purpose of essay.

TO investigate, without prejudice or prepossession, the question of our opium policy, is the purpose of this essay. It will be inspired by the desire to follow the surest facts and the safest authorities in its reasoning; the plain laws of right and wrong in its morality; and the spirit of international goodwill in its policy. It will seek to avoid, on the one hand, the extravagance which has overwrought the indictment against this trade, and on the other hand, the cynicism which has understated it; and, aiming always at practical conclusions, it will endeavor to appear measured in its judgments, and conciliatory in its views.

THE POPPY PLANT.

Introductory remarks.

Opium, the extract of Papaver somniferum -- a precious and sovereign medicine when rightly used, an insidious and fatal poison when abused -- is one of those gifts of Nature which, according to Zoroastrian doctrine, the powers of good and of evil might have combined to create. It is "too good to ban," where it serves mankind; it is "too bad to bless," when it enslaves them. In some one of its manifold forms it has in countless cases alleviated anguish, healed disease, and won back slumber to weary eyes. The ancients knew its virtues. They dedicated the poppy to Ceres; and the cup mixed by Helen in the Odyssey to charm away care was probably medicated with Egyptian capsules. Even in that vast land to which it is declared to have proved a threefold scourge -- bringing intemperance, and impoverishment, and war -- in China itself, opium was always ranked high among medicaments. Heu Naetze, Vice-President of the Sacrificial Board of Peking, memorializing his Emperor against the importation in 1834, remarks that the Materia Medica of Le Skeching, of the Ming dynasty, classes it first among benign drugs. It was declared by this classical authority, beside its soporific uses, to be a very valuable stimulant, "checking, at the same time, excessive secretions, and preventing the effect of noxious vapors." Its officinal Eastern name, afioom, afoom, or afoo (corrupted by the Chinese into afooyung), is perhaps of Arabic origin; but the Sanskrit has a special appellation for the extract,^[1] and China had an ancient word of its own for the poppy. For at least 200 years the drug has been known there. Until the reign of Keenlung, small foreign consignments of its juice were also welcomed at Canton, and paid a purposely light duty. But from that little root sprang up a commerce of the most prodigious dimensions, the character, morality, and issues of which it is the object of this essay to examine. If the trade in question has proved richer for the Government of British India than the trees of the Hesperides, there are serious voices which declare that to the Chinese people it has been deadly as the Upas. A steadily-increasing tribute, rising from lakhs to crores, from crores to six, eight, ten millions sterling per annum -- more easily obtained than any tax or cess ever known to administrators -- has rendered opium a mainstay of the Exchequer at Calcutta. And if it be true, as stands alleged,^[2] that the birth-rate of the Chinese coast, on the other hand, has sunk two percent,

[1]

[2] Vide "Medhurst's China" (London, 1838), pp. 56, 57.