Your ShelfYour Projects

The Curse of India

50%

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jan 3, 1884

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 10, No. 1.

Read the full edition

The Curse of India.

By Christian Statesman

SEVEN hundred thousand acres in India is devoted to the raising of opium. The natives were compelled at first by the Government of India to cultivate the poppy from which it is made, and the Government derives an immense revenue from it. The whole Eastern world is suffering terribly from this curse inflicted by the foremost nation on the earth. Not only the Eastern but the Western world is feeling the sad effects of the vice of opium-using. It is said that twenty thousand people in this country are the victims of the opium habit. From the last annual report of the Bureau of Statistics there were thirty thousand pounds more opium imported than in the previous year, and our Government receives more than half a million dollars duty on it, and we are all partners in this infernal revenue business.—Christian Statesman.