British Opium Policy and Its Results to India and China

WHILE these pages pass through the press, Major Baring at Calcutta bases a brilliant Budget on the profits of the poppy, and remits taxes, by its aid. It was so with his predecessors. The proceeds of the yearly sales realized in 1875 nine hundred and forty-one thousand pounds (£941,000) more than was estimated. But for the famine expenditure the poppy would thus have helped Lord Salisbury to a surplus, as it did the Duke of Argyle. As it was, the drug against which we have marshaled so many indictments helped his Viceroy to fight in Behar one of the noblest battles ever waged by a Christian Government.

Such are the complexities of finance, and such the irony of human events! But these prosperous figures have little or no force against what has been adduced. They must not mislead the public; they are a proof of the cautious estimates of Indian statesmen, and of the judicious nursing of cultivation in Bengal and the markets in China, far more than of the firmness of our opium revenue. This which Major Baring reports is but one side of the huge yearly speculation; the other would be quite likely to show a very different aspect.

Much more to the point are the ever-increasing fields of poppy in China, and those extraordinary pains which the Chinese Government is taking to equip a navy, and to establish arsenals on the modern basis.^[46] These things bear upon what Mr. Fawcett said before the House of Commons in 1872, speaking upon the opium triumph of Mr. Grant Duff. His words were: "No revenue can be more precarious. The Chinese watch our returns with great jealousy, and contemplate prohibiting imports again." And no one will be deceived by dazzling temporary figures in the Indian Budget who remembers what Mr. Eastwick said in the same debate: --

"But in 1871-72 the alternation was far more startling, for the crop in Behar fell off 14,743 chests, or 26 percent; and yet the actual revenue from opium exceeded the estimate by £1,845,100. Of course this could be, and has been, explained. It being known that the crop was deficient, prices rose, and Government, having a large reserve stock from previous years, were able, by watching the market and feeding it cautiously, to sell as much as they wished at the enhanced prices. On the other hand, as the crop was deficient, the estimated sum for labor was not required, and thus £491,600 was saved on the side of expenditure. Still, the fact remains that the Finance Minister, with all the facilities for calculation which his position gives him, is unable to tell within nearly £2,000,000 what he will get from opium, the second largest source of revenue that India possesses. Hitherto this uncertainty has turned out well; but it is an amphisbaena with two heads, and one may some day wound as the other has caressed us. In the Budget of 1872-73 the opium revenue is estimated at £1,553,400 less than the sum it reached last year; but all that can be safely predicted of these figures is that, from some cause or other, they are sure to be wrong. Indeed, the Finance Minister himself has expressly told us that he can form no opinion about opium likely to be correct, for at page 7 in his Statement for 1871-72 he says: --

"'The improvement of the Indian opium trade in China must, of course, have had its causes, which causes may be connected with the condition of the indigenous culture of the drug in China itself; but what exactly those causes are I hesitate to state to the Council, I may have my opinion and conjectures; but I really do not know, and I have not heard of any one who does know.'

[46] Vide Appendices (C) and (D).