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DRUGGING A NATION
[Illustration: H. E. TONG SHAO-I One of the Leaders of the Opium Reform
Movement in China]
Drugging a Nation
The Story of China
and the Opium Curse
A Personal Investigation, during an
Extended Tour, of the Present Conditions
of the Opium Trade in China
and Its Effects upon the Nation
By SAMUEL MERWIN
NEW YORK CHICAGO TORONTO
Fleming H. Revell Company
LONDON AND EDINBURGH
Copyright, 1908, by
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY
Copyright, 1907-1908, by
SUCCESS COMPANY
New York: 158 Fifth Avenue
Chicago: 80 Wabash Avenue
Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W.
London: 21 Paternoster Square
Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street
NOTE
These chapters were originally published during 1907 and 1908 in _Success
Magazine_. Though frankly journalistic in tone, the book presents
something more than the hasty conclusions of a journalist. During its
preparation the author travelled around the world, inquiring into the
problem at first hand in China and in England, reading all available
printed matter which seemed to bear in any way on the subject, and
interviewing several hundred gentlemen who have had special opportunities
to study the problem from various standpoints. The writing was not begun
until this preliminary work was completed and the natural conclusions had
become convictions in the author's mind.
CONTENTS
I. CHINA'S PREDICAMENT 9
II. THE GOLDEN OPIUM DAYS 20
III. A GLIMPSE INTO AN OPIUM PROVINCE 53
IV. CHINA'S SINCERITY 70
V. SOWING THE WIND IN CHINA--SHANGHAI 101
VI. SOWING THE WIND IN CHINA--TIENTSIN AND HONGKONG 129
VII. HOW BRITISH CHICKENS CAME HOME TO ROOST 154
VIII. THE POSITION OF GREAT BRITAIN 178
APPENDIX 204
ILLUSTRATIONS
_Facing page_
H. E. TONG SHAO-I _Title_
KNEADING CRUDE OPIUM WITH OIL TO MAKE ROUND OR FLAT CAKES 27
MAKING ROUND CAKES OF OPIUM 27
THE OPIUM HULKS OF SHANGHAI 50
AN OPIUM RECEIVING SHIP OR "GODOWN" AT SHANGHAI 50
THE VILLAGES WERE LITTLE MORE THAN HEAPS OF RUINS 54
AT LAST HE CRAWLS OUT ON THE HIGHWAY, WHINING, CHATTERING AND
PRAYING THAT A FEW COPPER CASH BE THROWN HIM 54
WRECK AND RUIN IN CHINA 68
ENFORCING THE EDICT AT SHANGHAI 88
IN AN OPIUM DEN, SHANGHAI 114
OPIUM-SMOKING 114
WEIGHING OPIUM IN A GOVERNMENT FACTORY IN INDIA 154
WHERE THE CHINAMAN TRAVELS, OPIUM TRAVELS TOO 172
Drugging a Nation
I
CHINA'S PREDICAMENT
In September, 1906, an edict was issued from the Imperial Court at Peking
which states China's predicament with naivete and vigour.
"The cultivation of the poppy," runs the edict, in the authorized
translation, "is the greatest iniquity in agriculture, and the provinces
of Szechuen, Shensi, Kansu, Yunnan, Kweichow, Shansi, and Kanghuai abound
in its product, which, in fact, is found everywhere. Now that it is
decided to abandon opium smoking within ten years, the limiting of this
cultivation should be taken as a fundamental step ... opium has been in
use so long by the people that nearly three-tenths or four-tenths of them
are smokers."
"Three-tenths or four-tenths" of the Chinese people,--one hundred and
fifty million opium-smokers--mean three or four times the population of
Great Britain, a good many more than the population of the United States!
The Chinese are notoriously inexact in statistical matters. The officials
who drew up the edict probably wished to convey the impression that the
situation is really grave, and employed this form of statement in order to
give force to the document. No accurate estimate of the number of opium
victims in China is obtainable; but it is possible to combine the
impressions which have been set down by reliable observers in different
parts of the "Middle Kingdom," and thus to arrive at a fair, general
impression of the truth. The following, for example, from Mr. Alexander
Hosie, the commercial attache to the British legation at Peking, should
carry weight. He is reporting on conditions in Szechuen Province:
"I am well within the mark when I say that in the cities fifty per cent.
of the males and twenty per cent. of the females smoke opium, and that in
the country the percentage is not less than twenty-five for men and five
per cent. for women." There are about forty-two million people in Szechuen
Province; and they not only raise and consume a very great quantity of
opium, they also send about twenty thousand tons down the Yangtse River
every year for use in other provinces. The report of other travellers,
merchants, and official investigators indicate that about all of the
richest soil in Szechuen is given over to poppy cultivation, and that the
labouring classes show a noticeable decline of late in physique and
capacity for work.
In regard to another so-called "opium province," Yunnan, we have the
following statement: "I saw practically the whole population given over to
its abuse. The ravages it is making in men, women, and children are
deplorable.... I was quite able to realize that any one who had seen the
wild abuse of opium in Yunnan would have a wild abhorrence of it."
In later chapters we shall go into the matter more at length. Here let me
add to these statements merely a few typical scraps of information,
selected from a bundle of note-books full of records of chats and
interviews with travellers of almost every nationality and of almost every
station in life. The secretary of a life insurance company which does a
considerable business up and down the coast told me that, roughly, fifty
per cent of the Chinese who apply for insurance are opium-smokers. Another
bit comes from a man who lived for several years in an inland city of a
quarter of a million inhabitants. The local Anti-opium League had 750
members, he said and he believed that about every other man in the city
was a smoker. "It is practically a case of everybody smoking," he
concluded.
Twenty-five years ago, when the consumption of opium in China could hardly
have been more than half what it is to-day, a British consul estimated the
proportion of smokers in the region he had visited as follows: "Labourers
and small farmers, ten per cent.; small shopkeepers, twenty per cent.;
soldiers, thirty per cent.; merchants, eighty per cent.; officials and
their staff, ninety per cent.; actors, prostitutes, vagrants, thieves,
ninety-five per cent." The labourers and farmers, the real strength of
China, as of every other land, had not yet been overwhelmed--but they were
going under, even then. The most startling news to-day is from these lower
classes, even from the country villages, the last to give way. Dr. Parker,
the American Methodist missionary at Shanghai, informed me that reports to
this effect were coming in steadily from up country; and during my own
journey I heard the same bad news almost everywhere along a route which
measured, before I left China, something more than four thousand miles.
Perhaps the most convincing summing up of China's predicament is found in
another translation from a recent Chinese document, this time an appeal to
the throne from four viceroys. The quaintness of the language does not, I
think, impair its effectiveness and its power as a protest: "China can
never become strong and stand shoulder and shoulder with the powers of the
world unless she can get rid of the habit of opium-smoking by her
subjects, about one quarter of whom have been reduced to skeletons and
look half-dead."
This then is the curse which the imperial government has talked so
quaintly of "abandoning." This is the debauchery which is to be put down
by officials, ninety per cent of whom were supposed to be more or less
confirmed smokers. Such almost childlike optimism brings to mind a certain
Sunday in New York City when Theodore Roosevelt, with the whole police
force under his orders, tried to close the saloons. It brings to mind
other attempts in Europe and America, to check and control vice and
depravity--attempts which have never, I think, been wholly
successful--and one begins to understand the discouraging immensity of the
task which China has undertaken. Really, to "stop using opium" would mean
a very rearranging of the agricultural plan of the empire. It would make
necessary an immediate solution of China's transportation problem (no
other crop is so easy to carry as opium) and an almost complete
reconstruction of the imperial finances; indeed, few observers are so glib
as to suggest offhand a substitute for the immense opium revenue to the
Chinese government. And nobody to accomplish all this but those sodden
officials, of whom it is safe to guess that fifty per cent have some sort
or other of a financial stake in the traffic!
In the minds of most of us, I think, there has been a vague notion that
the Chinese have always smoked opium, that opium is in some peculiar way a
necessity to the Chinese constitution. Even among those who know the
extraordinary history of this morbidly fascinating vegetable product, who
know that the India-grown British drug was pushed and smuggled and
bayoneted into China during a century of desperate protest and even armed
resistance from these yellow people, it has been a popular argument to
assert that the Chinese have only themselves to blame for the "demand"
that made the trade possible. Of this "demand," and of how it was worked
up by Christian traders, we shall speak at some length in later chapters.
"Educational methods" in the extending of trade can hardly be said to have
originated with the modern trust. The curious fact is that the Chinese
didn't use opium and didn't want opium.
Your true opium-smoker stretches himself on a divan and gives up ten or
fifteen minutes to preparing his thimbleful of the brown drug. When it has
been heated and worked to the proper consistency, he places it in the tiny
bowl of his pipe, holds it over a lamp, and draws a few whiffs of the
smoke deep into his lungs. It seems, at first, a trivial thing; indeed,
the man who is well fed and properly housed and clothed seems able to keep
it up for a considerable time and without appreciable ill results. The
greater difficulty in China is, of course, that very few opium-smokers are
well fed and properly housed and clothed.
I heard little about the beautiful dreams and visions which opium is
supposed to bring; all the smokers with whom I talked could be roughly
divided into two classes--those who smoked in order to relieve pain or
misery, and those miserable victims who smoked to relieve the acute
physical distress brought on by the opium itself. Probably the majority of
the victims take it up as a temporary relief; many begin in early
childhood; the mother will give the baby a whiff to stop its crying. It is
a social vice only among the upper classes. The most notable outward
effect of this indulgence is the resulting physical weakness and
lassitude. The opium-smoker cannot work hard; he finds it difficult to
apply his mind to a problem or his body to a task. As the habit becomes
firmly fastened on him, there is a perceptible weakening of his moral
fibre; he shows himself unequal to emergencies which make any sudden
demand upon him. If opium is denied him, he will lie and steal in order to
obtain it.
Opium-smoking is a costly vice. A pipefull of a moderately good native
product costs more than a labourer can earn in a day; consequently the
poorer classes smoke an unspeakable compound based on pipe scrapings and
charcoal. Along the highroads the coolies even scrape the grime from the
packsaddles to mix with this dross. The clerk earning from twenty-five to
fifty Mexican dollars a month will frequently spend from ten to twenty
dollars a month on opium. The typical confirmed smoker is a man who spends
a considerable part of the night in smoking himself to sleep, and all the
next morning in sleeping off the effects. If he is able to work at all, it
is only during the afternoon, and even at that there will be many days
when the official or merchant is incompetent to conduct his affairs.
Thousands of prominent men are ruined every year.
The Cantonese have what they call "The Ten Cannots regarding The
Opium-Smoker." "He cannot (1) give up the habit; (2) enjoy sleep; (3) wait
for his turn when sharing his pipe with his friends; (4) rise early; (5)
be cured if sick; (6) help relations in need; (7) enjoy wealth; (8) plan
anything; (9) get credit even when an old customer; (10) walk any
distance."
This is the land into which the enterprising Christian traders introduced
opium, and into which they fed opium so persistently and forcibly that at
last a "good market" was developed. England did not set out to ruin China.
One finds no hint of a diabolical purpose to seduce and destroy a
wonderful old empire on the other side of the world. The ruin worked was
incidental to that far Eastern trade of which England has been so proud.
It was the triumph of the balance sheet over common humanity.
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.
The India Government Opium Monopoly is an import factor in this
extraordinary story of a debauchery of a third of the human race by the
most nearly Christian among Christian nations. We must understand what it
is and how it works before we can understand the narrative of that greed,
with its attendant smuggling, bribery and bloodshed which has brought the
Chinese empire to its knees. In speaking of it as a "monopoly," I am not
employing a cant word for effect. I am not making a case. That is what it
is officially styled in a certain blue book on my table which bears the
title, "Statement Exhibiting the Moral and Material Progress of India
during the year 1905-6," and which was ordered by the House of Commons, to
be printed, May 10th, 1907.
It is easy, with or without evidence, to charge a great corporation or a
great government with inhuman crimes. If the charge be unjust it is
difficult for the corporation or the government to set itself right before
the people. Six truths cannot overtake one lie. That is why, in this day
of popular rule, the really irresponsible power that makes and unmakes
history lies in the hands of the journalist. As the charge I am bringing
is so serious as to be almost unthinkable, and as I wish to leave no
loophole for the counter-charge that I am colouring this statement, I
think I can do no better than to lift my description of the Opium Monopoly
bodily from that rather ponderous blue book.
There is nothing new in this charge, nothing new in the condition which
invites it. It is rather a commonplace old condition. Millions of men, for
more than a hundred years, have taken it for granted, just as men once
took piracy for granted, just as men once took the African slave-trade for
granted, just as men to-day take the highly organized traffic in
unfortunate women and girls for granted. Ask a Tory political leader of
to-day--Mr. Balfour say--for his opinion on the opium question, and if he
thinks it worth his while to answer you at all he will probably deal
shortly with you for dragging up an absurd bit of fanaticism. For a
century or more, about all the missionaries, and goodness knows how many
other observers, have protested against this monstrous traffic in poison.
Sixty-five years ago Lord Ashley (afterwards Earl of Shaftesbury) agitated
the question in Parliament. Fifty years ago he obtained from the Law
Officers of the Crown the opinion that the opium trade was "at variance"
with the "spirit and intention" of the treaty between England and China.
In 1891, the House of Commons decided by a good majority that "the system
by which the Indian opium revenue is raised is morally indefensible." And
yet, I will venture to believe that to most of my readers, British as well
as American, the bald statement that the British Indian government
actually manufactures opium on a huge scale in its own factories to suit
the Chinese taste comes with the force of a shock. It is not the sort of a
thing we like to think of as among the activities of an Anglo-Saxon
government. It would seem to be government ownership with a vengeance.
Now, to get down to cases, just what this Government Opium Monopoly is,
and just how does it work? An excerpt from the rather ponderous blue book
will tell us. It may be dry, but it is official and unassailable. It is
also short.
"The opium revenue"--thus the blue book--"is partly raised by a monopoly
of the production of the drug in Bengal and the United Provinces, and
partly by the levy of a duty on all opium imported from native states....
In these two provinces, the crop is grown under the control of a
government department, which arranges the total area which is to be placed
under the crop, with a view to the amount of opium required."
So much for the broader outline. Now for a few of the details:
"The cultivator of opium in these monopoly districts receives a license,
and is granted advances to enable him to prepare the land for the crop,
and he is required to deliver the whole of the product at a fixed price to
opium agents, by whom it is dispatched to the government factories at
Patna and Ghazipur."
This money advanced to the cultivator bears no interest. The British
Indian government lends money without interest in no other cases.
Producers of crops other than opium are obliged to get along without free
money.
When it has been manufactured, the opium must be disposed of in one way
and another; accordingly:
"The supply of prepared opium required for consumption in India is made
over to the Excise Department.... The chests of 'provision' opium, for
export, are sold by auction at monthly sales, which take place at
Calcutta." For the meaning of the curious term, "provision opium," we have
only to read on a little further. "The opium is received and prepared at
the government factories, where the out-turn for the year included 8,774
chests of opium for the Excise Department, about 300 pounds of various
opium alkaloids, thirty maunds of medical opium, and 51,770 chests of
provision opium for the Chinese market." There are about 140 pounds in a
chest. Four grains of opium, administered in one dose to a person
unaccustomed to its use, is apt to prove fatal.
Last year the government had under poppy cultivation 654,928 acres. And
the revenue to the treasury, including returns from auction sales, duties,
and license fees, and deducting all "opium expenditures," was nearly
$22,000,000 (L4,486,562).
The best grade of opium-poppy bears a white blossom. One sees mauve and
pink tints in a field, at blossom-time, but only the seeds from the white
flowers are replanted. The opium of commerce is made from the gum obtained
by gashing the green seed pod with a four-bladed knife. After the first
gathering, the pod is gashed a second time, and the gum that exudes makes
an inferior quality of opium. The raw opium from the country districts is
sent down to the government factories in earthenware jars, worked up in
mixing vats, and made into balls about six or eight inches in diameter.
The balls, after a thorough drying on wooden racks, are packed in chests
and sent down to the auction.
[Illustration: KNEADING CRUDE OPIUM WITH OIL TO MAKE ROUND OR FLAT CAKES]
[Illustration: MAKING ROUND CAKES OF OPIUM]
The men who buy in the opium at these monthly auctions and afterwards
dispose of it at the Chinese ports are a curious crowd of Parsees,
Mohammedans, Hindoos, and Asiatic Jews. Few British names appear in the
opium trade to-day. British dignity prefers not to stoop beneath the
taking in of profits; it leaves the details of a dirty business to dirty
hands. This is as it has been from the first. The directors of the East
India Company, years and years before that splendid corporation
relinquished the actual government of India, forbade the sending of its
specially-prepared opium direct to China, and advised a trading station on
the coast whence the drug might find its way, "without the company being
exposed to the disgrace of being engaged in an illicit commerce."
So clean hands and dirty hands went into partnership. They are in
partnership still, save that the most nearly Christian of governments has
officially succeeded the company as party of the first part. And
sixty-five tons of Indian opium go to China every week.
As soon as the shipments of opium have reached Hongkong and Shanghai (I am
quoting now in part from a straightforward account by the Rev. T. G.
Selby), they are broken up and pass in the ordinary courses of trade into
the hands of retail dealers. The opium balls are stripped of the dried
leaves in which they have been packed, torn like paste dumplings into
fragments, put into an iron pan filled with water and boiled over a slow
fire. Various kinds of opium are mixed with each other, and some shops
acquire a reputation for their ingenious and tasteful blends. After the
opium has been boiled to about the consistency of coal tar or molasses, it
is put into jars and sold for daily consumption in quantities ranging from
the fiftieth part of an ounce to four or five ounces. "I am sorry to say,"
observes Mr. Selby, "that the colonial governments of Hongkong and
Singapore, not content with the revenue drawn from this article by the
Anglo-Indian government, have made opium boiling a monopoly of the Crown,
and a large slice of the revenue of these two Eastern dependencies is
secured by selling the exclusive rights to farm this industry to the
highest bidder."
The most Mr. Clean Hands has been able to say for himself is that, "Opium
is a fiscal, not a moral question;" or this, that "In the present state of
the revenue of India, it does not appear advisable to abandon so important
a source of revenue." After all, China is a long way off. So much for Mr.
Clean Hands! His partner, Dirty Hands, is more interesting. It is he who
has "built up the trade." It is he who has carried on the smuggling and
the bribing and knifing and shooting and all-round, strong-arm work which
has made the trade what it is. To be sure, as we get on in this narrative
we shall not always find the distinction between Clean and Dirty so clear
as we would like. Through the dust and smoke and red flame of all that
dirty business along "the Coast" we shall glimpse for an instant or so,
now and then, a face that looks distressingly like the face of old
Respectability himself. I have found myself in momentary bewilderment when
walking through the splendid masonry-lined streets of Hongkong, when
sitting beneath the frescoed ceiling of that pinnacled structure that
houses the most nearly Christian of parliaments, trying to believe that
this opium drama can be real. And I have wondered, and puzzled, until a
smell like the smell of China has come floating to the nostrils of memory;
until a picture of want and disease and misery--of crawling, swarming
human misery unlike anything which the untravelled Western mind can
conceive--has appeared before the eyes of memory. I have thought of those
starving thousands from the famine districts creeping into Chinkiang to
die, of those gaunt, seemed faces along the highroad that runs
southwestward from Peking to Sian-fu; I have thought of a land that knows
no dentistry, no surgery, no hygiene, no scientific medicine, no
sanitation; of a land where the smallpox is a lesser menace beside the
leprosy, plague, tuberculosis, that rage simply at will, and beside
famines so colossal in their sweep, that the overtaxed Western mind simply
refuses to comprehend them. And De Quincey's words have come to me: "What
was it that drove me into the habitual use of opium? Misery--blank
desolation--settled and abiding darkness----?" These words help to clear
it up. China was a wonderful field, ready prepared for the ravages of
opium--none better. The mighty currents of trade did the rest. The
balance sheet reigned supreme as by right. The balance sheet reigns
to-day.
But we must get on with our narrative. I will try to pass it along in the
form in which it has presented itself to me. If Clean and Dirty appear in
closer and more puzzling alliance than we like to see them, I cannot help
that.
It was not easy getting opium, the commodity, into the currents of trade.
There was an obstacle. The Chinese were not an opium-consuming race. They
did not use opium, they did not want opium, they steadily resisted the
inroads of opium. But the rulers of the company were far-seeing men. Tempt
misery long enough and it will take to opium. Two centuries ago when small
quantities of the drug were brought in from Java, the Chinese government
objected. In 1729 the importation was prohibited. As late as 1765, this
importation, carried on by energetic traders in spite of official
resistance, had never exceeded two hundred chests a year. But with the
advent of the company in 1773, the trade grew. In spite of a second
Chinese prohibition in 1796, half-heartedly enforced by corrupt mandarins,
the total for 1820 was 4,000 chests. The Chinese government was faced not
only with the possibility of a race debauchery but also with an immediate
and alarming drain of silver from the country. The balance of the trade
was against them. Either as an economic or moral problem, the situation
was grave.
The smoking of opium began in China and is peculiar to the Chinese. The
Hindoos and Malays eat it. Complicated and wide-spread as the smoking
habit is to-day, it is a modern custom as time runs in China. There seems
to be little doubt in the minds of those Sinologues who have traced the
opium thread back to the tangle of early missionary reports and imperial
edicts, that the habit started either in Formosa or on the mainland across
the Straits, where malaria is common. Opium had been used, generations
before, as a remedy for malaria; and these first smokers seem to have
mixed a little opium with their tobacco, which had been introduced by the
Portuguese in the early seventeenth century. From this beginning, it would
appear, was developed the rather elaborate outfit which the opium-smoker
of to-day considers necessary to his pleasure.
Nothing but solid Anglo-Saxon persistence had enabled the company to
build up the trade. Seven years after their first small adventure, or in
1780, a depot of two small receiving hulks was established in Lark's Bay,
south of Macao. A year later the company freighted a ship to Canton, but
finding no demand were obliged to sell the lot of 1,600 chests at a loss
to Sinqua, a Canton "Hong-merchant," who, not being able to dispose of it
to advantage, reshipped it. The price in that year was $550 (Mexican) a
chest; Sinqua had paid the company only $200, but even at a bargain he
found no market. Meantime, in the words of a "memorandum," prepared by
Joshua Rowntree for the debate in parliament last year, "British merchants
spread the habit up and down the coast; opium store-ships armed as
fortresses were moored at the mouth of the Canton River."
In 1782, the company's supercargoes at Canton wrote to Calcutta: "The
importation of opium being strongly prohibited by the Chinese government,
and a business altogether new to us, it was necessary for us to take our
measures (for disposing of a cargo) with the utmost caution."
This "business altogether new to us" was, of course, plain smuggling. From
the first it had been necessary to arm the smuggling vessels; and as
these grew in number the Chinese sent out an increasing number of armed
revenue junks or cruisers. The traders usually found it possible to buy
off the commanders of the revenue junks, but as this could not be done in
every case it was inevitable that there should be encounters now and then,
with occasional loss of life. These affrays soon became too frequent to be
ignored.
Meantime the British government had succeeded the company in the rule of
India and the control of the far Eastern trade. As this trade was from two
thirds to four-fifths opium, a prohibited article, and as the whole
question of trade was complicated by the fact that China was ignorant of
the greatness and power of the Western nations and did not care to treat
or deal with them in any event, a government trade agent had been sent out
to Canton to look after British interests and in general to fill the
position of a combined consul and unaccredited minister. In the late
1830's this agent, Captain Charles Elliot (successor to Lord Napier, the
first agent), found himself in the delicate position of protecting English
smugglers, who were steadily drawing their country towards war because
the Chinese government was making strong efforts to drive them out of
business. From what Captain Elliot has left on record it is plain that he
was having a bad time of it. In 1837, he wrote to Lord Palmerston of "the
wide-spreading public mischief" arising from "the steady continuance of a
vast, prohibited traffic in an article of vicious luxury," and suggested
that "a gradual check to our own growth and imports would be salutary."
Two years later he wrote that "the Chinese government have a just ground
for harsh measures towards the lawful trade, upon the plea that there is
no distinction between the right and the wrong."
He even said: "No man entertains a deeper detestation of the disgrace and
sin of this forced traffic;" and, "I see little to choose between it and
piracy." But when the war cloud broke, and responsibility for the welfare
of Britain's subjects and trade interests in China devolved upon him, he
compromised. "It does not consort with my station," he wrote, "to sanction
measures of general and undistinguishing violence against His Majesty's
officers and subjects."
It will be interesting before we consider the opium war and its immense
significance in history, to glance over the attitude of the company and
later of its successor, the government, towards the whole miserable
business. The company's board of directors, in 1817, had sent this
dispatch from Calcutta in answer to a question, "Were it possible to
prevent the using of the drug altogether, except strictly for the purpose
of medicine, we would gladly do it in compassion to mankind."
It would be pleasant to believe that the East India Company was sincere in
this ineffective if well-phrased expression of "compassion." The spectacle
of a great corporation in any century giving up a lucrative traffic on
merely human and moral grounds would be illuminating and uplifting. But
unfortunate business corporations are, in their very nature, slaves of the
balance sheet, organized representatives of the mighty laws of trade. I
have already quoted enough evidence to show that the company was not only
awake to the dangers of opium, but that it had deliberately and
painstakingly worked up the traffic. Had there been, then, a change of
heart in the directorate? I fear not. Among the East Indian
correspondence of 1830, this word from the company's governor-general came
to light: "We are taking measures for extending the cultivation of the
poppy, with a view to a larger increase in the supply of opium." And in
this same year, 1830, a House of Commons committee reported that "The
trade, which is altogether contraband, has been largely extended of late
years."
G. H. M. Batten, a formal official of the Indian Civil Service, who
contributed the chapter on opium in Sir John Strachey's work on "India,
its Administration and Progress," has been regarded of late years as one
of the ablest defenders of the whole opium policy. He believes that "The
daily use of opium in moderation is not only harmless but of positive
benefit, and frequently even a necessity of life." This man, seeing little
but good in opium, doubts "if it ever entered into the conception of the
court of directors to suppress in the interests of morality the
cultivation of the poppy."
Perhaps the most striking testimony bearing against the policy of the
company was that given by Robert Inglis, of Canton, a partner in the large
opium-trading firm of Dent & Co., to the Select Committee on China Trade
(House of Commons, 1840). Here it is:
Mr. Inglis.--"I told him (Captain Elliot) that I was sure the thing could
not go on."
Mr. Gladstone.--"How long ago have you told him that you were sure the
thing could not go on?"
Mr. Inglis.--"For four or five years past."
Chairman.--"What gave you that impression?"
Mr. Inglis.--"An immense quantity of opium being forced upon the Chinese
every year, and that in its turn forcing it up the coast in our vessels."
Chairman.--"When you use the words 'forcing it upon them,' do you mean
that they were not voluntary purchasers?"
Mr. Inglis.--"No, but the East India Company were increasing the quantity
of opium almost every year, without reference to the demand in China; that
is to say, there was always an immense supply of opium in China, and the
company still kept increasing the quantity at lower prices."
Three years later, just after the war, Sir George Staunton, speaking from
experience as a British official in the East, said in the House of
Commons, "I never denied the fact that if there had been no opium
smuggling there would have been no war.
"Even if the opium habit had been permitted to run its natural course, if
it had not received an extraordinary impulse from the measures taken by
the East India Company to promote its growth, which almost quadrupled the
supply, I believe it would never have created that extraordinary alarm in
the Chinese authorities which betrayed them into the adoption of a sort of
_coup d' etat_ for its suppression."
Sir William Muir, some time lieutenant-governor of the Northwest Provinces
of India, is on record thus: "By increasing its supply of 'provision'
opium, it (the Bengal government) has repeatedly caused a glut in the
Chinese market, a collapse of prices in India, an extensive bankruptcy and
misery in Malwa."
The most interesting summing-up of the whole question I have seen is from
the pen of Sir Arthur Cotton, who wrote after sixty years' experience in
Indian affairs, protesting against "continuing this trading upon the sins
and miseries of the greatest nation in the world in respect of
population, on the ground of our needing the money."
What was China doing to protect herself from these aggressions? The
British merchants and the British trade agent had by this time worked into
the good-will of the Chinese merchants and the corrupt mandarins, and had
finally established their residence at Canton and their depot of
store-ships at Whampoa, a short journey down the river. In 1839 there were
about 20,000 chests of opium stored in these hulks. In that same year the
Chinese emperor sent a powerful and able official named Lin Tse-hsu from
Peking to Canton with orders to put down the traffic at any cost.
Commissioner Lin was a man of unusual force. He perfectly understood the
situation in so far as it concerned China. He had his orders. He knew what
they meant. He proposed to put them into effect. There was only one
important consideration which he seems to have overlooked--it was that
India "needed the money." His proposal that the foreign agents deliver up
their stores of "the prohibited article" did not meet with an immediate
response. The traders had not the slightest notion of yielding up 20,000
chests of opium, worth, at that time, $300 a chest. Lin's appeals to the
most nearly Christian of queens, were no more successful. He did not seem
to understand that China was a long way off; it was very close to him.
Here is a translation of what he had to say. To our eyes to-day, it seems
fairly intelligent, even reasonable:
"Though not making use of it one's self, to venture on the manufacture and
sale of it (opium) and with it to seduce the simple folk of this land is
to seek one's own livelihood by the exposure of others to death. Such acts
are bitterly abhorrent to the nature of man and are utterly opposed to the
ways of heaven. We would now then concert with your 'Hon. Sovereignty'
means to bring a perpetual end to this opium traffic so hurtful to
mankind, we in this land forbidding the use of it and you in the nations
under your dominion forbidding its manufacture."
Her "Hon. Sovereignty," if she ever saw this appeal (which may be
doubted), neglected to reply. Meeting with small consideration from the
traders, as from their sovereign, Commissioner Lin set about carrying out
his orders. There was an admirable thoroughness in his methods. He
surrounded the residence of the traders, Captain Elliot's among them,
with an army of howling, drum-beating Chinese soldiers, and again proposed
that they deliver up those 20,000 chests. Now, the avenues of trade do not
lead to martyrdom. Traders rarely die for their principles--they prefer
living for them. The 20,000 chests were delivered up, with a rapidity that
was almost haste; and the merchants, under the leadership of the agent,
withdrew to the doubtful shelter of their own guns, down the river.
Commissioner Lin, still with that exasperatingly thorough air, mixed the
masses of opium with lime and emptied it into the sea. England, her
dignity outraged, hurt at her tenderest point, sent out ships, men and
money. She seized port after port; bombarded and took Canton; swept
victoriously up the Yangtse, and by blocking the Grand Canal at Chinkiang
interrupted the procession of tribute junks sailing up the Peking and thus
cut off an important source of the Chinese imperial revenue. This resulted
in the treaty of Nanking, in 1843, which was negotiated by the British
government by Sir Henry Pottinger.
Sir Henry, like Commissioner Lin, had his orders. His methods, like Lin's,
were admirable in their thoroughness. He secured the following terms from
the crestfallen Chinese government: 1. There was to be a "lasting peace"
between the two nations. 2. Canton, Amoy, Foochou, Ningpo, and Shanghai
were to be open as "treaty ports." 3. The Island of Hongkong was to be
ceded to Great Britain. 4. An indemnity of $21,000,000 was to be paid,
$6,000,000 as the value of the opium destroyed, $3,000,000 for the
destruction of the property of British subjects, and $12,000,000 for the
expenses of the war. It was further understood that the British were to
hold the places they had seized until these and a number of other
humiliating conditions were to be fulfilled. Thus was the energy and
persistence of the opium smugglers rewarded. Thus began that partition of
China which has been going on ever since. It is difficult to be a
Christian when far from home.
It is difficult to get an admission even to-day, from a thorough-going
British trader, that opium had anything to do with the war of 1840-43. He
is likely to insist either that the war was caused by the refusal of
Chinese officials to admit English representatives on terms of equality,
or that it was caused by "the stopping of trade." There was, indeed, a
touch of the naively Oriental in the attitude of China. To the Chinese
official mind, China was the greatest of nations, occupying something like
five-sixths of the huge flat disc called the world. England, Holland,
Spain, France, Portugal, and Japan were small islands crowded in between
the edge of China and the rim of the disc. That these small nations should
wish to trade with "the Middle Kingdom" and to bring tribute to the "Son
of Heaven," was not unnatural. But that the "Son of Heaven" must admit
them whether he liked or not, and as equals, was preposterous. Stripping
these notions of their quaint Orientalism, they boiled down to the simple
principle that China recognized no law of earth or heaven which could
force her to admit foreign traders, foreign ministers, or foreign
religions if she preferred to live by herself and mind her own business.
That China has minded her own business and does mind her own business is,
I think, indisputable.
The notions which animated the English were equally simple. Stripped of
their quaint Occidental shell of religion and respectability and theories
of personal liberty, they seem to boil down to about this--that China was
a great and undeveloped market and therefore the trading nations had a
right to trade with her willy-nilly, and any effective attempt to stop
this trade was, in some vague way, an infringement of their rights as
trading nations. In maintaining this theory, it is necessary for us to
forget that opium, though a "commodity," was an admittedly vicious and
contraband commodity, to be used "for purposes of foreign commerce only."
In providing that there should be a "lasting peace" between the two
nations, it was probably the idea to insure British traders against
attack, or rather to provide a technical excuse for reprisals in case of
such attacks. But for some reason nothing whatever was said about opium in
the treaty. Now opium was more than ever the chief of the trade. England
had not the slightest notion of giving it up; on the contrary, opium
shipments were increased and the smuggling was developed to an
extraordinary extent. How a "lasting peace" was to be maintained while
opium, the cause of all the trouble, was still unrecognized by either
government as a legitimate commodity, while, indeed, the Chinese, however
chastened and humiliated, were still making desperate if indirect efforts
to keep it out of the country and the English were making strong efforts
to get it into the country, is a problem I leave to subtler minds. The
upshot was, of course, that the "lasting peace" did not last. Within
fifteen years there was another war. By the second treaty (that of
Tientsin, 1858) Britain secured 4,000,000 taels of indemnity money (about
$3,000,000), the opening of five more treaty ports, toleration for the
Christian religion, and the admission of opium under a specified tariff.
The Tientsin Treaty legalized Christianity and opium. China had defied the
laws of trade, and had learned her lesson. It had been a costly
lesson--$24,000,000 in money, thousands of lives, the fixing on the race
of a soul-blighting vice, the loss of some of her best seaports, more, the
loss of her independence as a nation--but she had learned it. And
therefore, except for a crazy outburst now and then as the foreign grip
grew tighter, she was to submit.
But China's trouble was not over. If she was to be debauched whether or
no, must she also be ruined financially? There were the indemnity payments
to meet, with interest; and no way of meeting them other than to squeeze
tighter a poverty-stricken nation which was growing more poverty-stricken
as her silver drained steadily off to the foreigners. There was a solution
to the problem--a simple one. It was to permit the growth of opium in
China itself, supplant the Indian trade, keep the silver at home. But
China was slow to adopt this solution. It might solve the fiscal problem;
but incidentally it might wreck China. She sounded England on the
subject,--once, twice. There seemed to have been some idea that England,
convinced that China had her own possibility of crowding out the Indian
drug, might, after all, give up the trade, stop the production in India,
and make the great step unnecessary. But England could not see it in that
light. China wavered, then took the great step. The restrictions on
opium-growing were removed. This was probably a mistake, though opinions
still differ about that. To the men who stood responsible for a solution
of Chinese fiscal problem it doubtless seemed necessary. At all events,
the last barrier between China and ruin was removed by the Chinese
themselves. And within less than half a century after the native growth of
the poppy began, the white and pink and mauve blossoms have spread across
the great empire, north and south, east and west, until to-day, in
blossom-time almost every part of every province has its white and mauve
patches. You may see them in Manchuria, on the edge of the great desert of
Gobi, within a dozen miles of Peking; you may see them from the headwaters
of the mighty Yangtse to its mouth, up and down the coast for two thousand
miles, on the distant borders of Thibet.