But this proposition, so eminently consistent with Christian teaching and with humane impulses, implied a degree of virtue far in advance of the sentiments of the British cabinet; and Lord Elgin sought the legalization of the traffic. The Chinese, feeling themselves helpless before their conquerors, reluctantly consented. They proposed a duty of sixty taels (over $80) a chest; but the English commissioners would agree to no higher rate than thirty taels, which was therefore the rate adopted and inserted in the tariff. When the treaty was under revision. in 1869 Sir Rutherford Alcock agreed to raise the duty to fifty taels; but the British Government refused to ratify the treaty, and the original treaty of Tientsin remains in force.

Thus at last the opium traffic was legalized in China; but it did not thereby become one whit less abhorrent to God and to all righteous men. Legalized iniquity is iniquity still; and it is not in the power of legislative enactments or treaty stipulations to lessen the crime of an accursed traffic, or to shield its abettors from their responsibility to a just and holy God. The Emperor Tao-kwang had said to Sir Henry Pottinger, when the latter proposed the legalization of the traffic: "It is true, I cannot prevent the introduction of the flowing poison; gain-seeking and corrupt men will for profit and sensuality defeat my wishes; but nothing will induce me to derive a revenue from the vice and misery of my people." His successor was obliged to do that which he so sturdily had refused, but the vermilion pencil never moved so reluctantly as when it sanctioned the legalization of the opium trade.

For the last quarter of a century the British Government has been directly responsible for the whole iniquity, from the growth of the poppy in India to the sale of the drug in China. Almost at the very time that British cannon were thundering in Chinese ports to secure the treaty which legalized the opium traffic, the governing power in India was taken away from the East India Company by act of Parliament, and the Crown assumed direct control. Since 1858 the British Government has been the great opium grower of the world. Before that date the production of opium in India was a monopoly of the East India Company. To this precious privilege, as well as to all other rights of the company, the Crown succeeded.

convenient coincidence that the legalization of the traffic was

effected just as the government went directly into the business of opium raising, and took control of India! It would not have looked well for the British Government to be directly promoting a contraband trade. When its responsibility was filtered through the East India Company the iniquity could not be brought so close home; but now that the government was going into the business, it was respectable and seemly to have legal sanction to the trade.

As an opium monopolist, it is not too much to say that the British Government has not only emulated the example of its predecessor, the East India Company, but has gone far beyond it!

The official correspondence of the administrators in India with the home government yields abundant proof of the determination to make opium a source of gain, and to push the trade to the utmost. Thus the Honorable J. Strachey writes, in 1869:

Immediate measures of the most energetic character ought to be taken with the object of increasing the production of opium. . . I think that the very least which we ought now to do is to endeavor with the least possible delay to bring up the total area under opium cultivation to seven hundred and ninety thousand five hundred beegahs, the extent declared by the LieutenantGovernor of Bengal to be necessary for the production of fiftyfour thousand five hundred chests. I believe myself that we might with propriety go much farther, but any thing less than this will, I think, be certainly too little.

The Honorable W. Grey, Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, writes to C. H. Campbell:

Are you quite satisfied that the fullest possible extension is being pushed in the Benares Agency? . . . If Carnac should see his way to doing any thing more than he has done already to extend the cultivation for next season you need not hesitate to sanction it at once.

Sir R. Temple writes:

I am clear for extending the cultivation, and for insuring a plentiful supply. If we do not do this, the Chinese will do it for themselves. They had better have our good opium than their own indifferent opium. There really is no moral objection to our conduct in this respect.

Sir Rutherford Alcock agreed in 1869 to a revision of the treaty of Tientsin, as we have seen, which embraced an

increase of the duty on opium. He went from Peking immediately to Calcutta, and held a conference with the members of the Indian Government in February, 1870. He urged them not to oppose the concession he had made, and set forth in strong terms the moral objections to the trade. He expressed his belief in the genuine character of the Chinese opposition to the trade; but also assured them that there was danger that the Chinese would in self-defense develop opium cultivation in China, and drive the Indian drug out of the market. On the other hand, if Great Britain would give up the opium revenue, and suppress the cultivation in India, he believed the Chinese Government could and would suppress the growth in China, except in Yunnan, where its authority was in abeyance. Sir R. Temple asked whether, on condition that the Indian Government would fix a limit to the amount of opium sent to China, the Chinese Government would agree to repress the growth of the poppy in China; to which Sir Rutherford Alcock replied affirmatively, and again expressed his strong desire that the British Government would agree to some effective measures to discourage the consumption of opium in China. Now mark the reply made to this honest and frank effort of the British Minister to China. In two months after his conversation with them the Indian Government adopted the following resolution:

No. 2090, dated 25th March, 1870.-By the Government of India, Financial

Department.

Resolution. The Government of Bengal shall be informed that the Supreme Government has resolved to increase the annual provision of opium in Bengal for export to China to sixty thousand chests, gradually indeed, but still with as much promptitude as may be conveniently practicable, and will be prepared to sanction any expenditure that, on full consideration, may appear necessary for this object. It is not deemed needful at present to raise the price paid to the cultivators to five rupees a seer, but the Supreme Government recognizes the probability that this concession must soon be made, and will be prepared to consider favorably any recommendation made by the Government of Bengal for such an increase, if it be found by experience that effect. cannot otherwise be given to this resolution.

Ordered, That the foregoing resolution be communicated to the Government of Bengal for information and guidance.

Such was the answer of the Indian Government to the earnest plea of the British Minister to China-a resolution to FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XXXV.—47

increase the production of opium, and carry on the iniquitous trade on a larger scale than ever! In the thirteen years following, the traffic has been pushed as vigorously as at any previous period. In 1876 a new convention with China was made by Sir Thomas Wade, known as the "Convention of Chefoo," the third article of which is as follows:

On opium, Sir Thomas Wade will move his government to sanction an arrangement different from that affecting other imports. British merchants, when opium is brought into port, will be obliged to have it taken cognizance of by the customs, and deposited in bond, either in a warehouse or a receiving hulk, until such time as there is a sale for it. The importer will then pay the tariff duty upon it, and the purchasers the li-kin. In order to the prevention of the evasion of the duty, the amount of li-kin to be collected will be decided by the different Provincial Governments, according to the circumstances of each.

The li-kin is a special internal tax, which may be raised or lowered at the discretion of the provincial governors, and the object of making this tax collectable by the customs was practically to put the traffic within the control of the Chinese Government. Sir Thomas Wade was quite ready to do this, as might be expected of a minister who said in an official dispatch to his government: "It is to me vain to think otherwise of the use of the drug in China than as of a habit many times more pernicious, nationally speaking, than the gin and whisky drinking which we deplore at home;" and who also said:

The concessions made to us have been from first to last extorted against the conscience of the nation-in defiance, that is to say, of the moral convictions of its educated men-not merely of the office-holders, whom we call mandarins, and who are numerically but a small proportion of the educated class, but of the millions who are saturated with the knowledge of the history and philosophy of their country.

But to this day the British Government has refused to ratify the Convention of Chefoo, and has left the opium trade just as it was, while assuming the advantages conferred by those articles of the convention favorable to British trade.

It is a little over a century since the East India Company began to export opium to China. In the sixty years which elapsed before the monopoly of British trade in China was taken away from that company, (1773-1834,) the amount of

opium imported into that country was run up from 200 chests to 21,785 chests, valued at $14,454,193. [A chest contains about 133 pounds.] The company then lost its monopoly of trade in China, but retained its monopoly of production in India, and in 1858 had run up the total export from India to 74,738 chests. The British Government then took its place, and by 1872 had increased the export to 88,789 chests. Its net revenue from opium then amounted to $38,286,065. In 1879 the amount of opium imported into China from India, under monopoly of the British Government, was over 83,000 chests, (more than eleven millions of pounds, or over five thousand tons!) It is estimated that about 22,000 chests were smuggled from Hong-Kong into China the same year—which would make the whole amount about fourteen millions of pounds, or over six thousand tons! The value of the regularly imported drug was $50,700,000; while the value of all the tea exported was only $46,000,000-so that, after China had given up her entire crop of two hundred and sixty-five millions of pounds of tea, she still had to pay $4,700,000, to make up the amount due for opium!

No wonder the Archbishop of York felt moved to say:

The state of the matter is this: that the Christian nation of England has been in the past continually engaged in enforcing an unwilling nation to purchase great quantities of poison, which it has given to them; and has not scrupled to go to war even to enforce what I must call an iniquitous trade. Now, that being so, I do say that we cannot hold up our heads among the nations of the world if, when attention has once been directed to this matter, we allow it to slumber and sleep. . . . It makes the Queen herself, who is now the sovereign, the Empress of India, responsible... for poisoning the people, for destroying them physically and morally, and for corrupting a whole nation that is ready to protest against the corruption. . . . We say that it is a wrong thing from first to last. We say that it is a disgrace and a shame to this country that a heathen people should have to ask us to hold our hands and not to force the opium upon them, and that we as a Christian people should refuse to hold our hands, and with fire and sword make them take this deadly drug.

It is hardly possible fully to realize, or to characterize in adequate terms, the awful iniquity of this death-dealing traffic. The spectacle presented is not that of a government reluctantly