The Relation of England's Opium Policy to Christian Missions in China.
By James Brand
BEFORE proceeding to any moral considerations, let us briefly examine some of the effects of this traffic upon the three parties—India, China, and England—immediately concerned. First, financially. It can hardly be doubted, that, although the opium trade has secured to British India an immense revenue, it is, after all, proving to be what Dr. S. Wells Williams said, “a financial blunder.” It has been a policy by which England has pulled down with one hand what she was building up with the other. The immense cultivation of opium in India has monopolized the best part of the country, supplanting the production of food crops to such an extent that impoverishment and famine are the result. Vast areas of the richest land in India are thus devoted, not to the production of food, but to the production of Government revenue. According to the report of G. Smith, LL.D., on East India finance, in the year 1871, thousands of people perished from starvation in consequence of so much land in Malwa being devoted to the poppy. He further states that prior to the introduction of British rule in Arracan, the people were hard-working, sober, and simple-minded; but one of the first measures of the Bengal Board of Revenue was to organize efforts to introduce the use of the drug, and to create a taste for it among the rising generation. The plan, to use his own words, “was to open a shop with a few cakes of opium and to invite the young men, and distribute it gratuitously. Then, when the taste was established, to sell the opium at a low rate, and finally, as it spread through the neighborhood, the price was raised and large profits ensued.” This infamous practice is bearing its fruits. Mr. Hind, assistant commissioner for the English Government, says he saw “a fine, healthy generation of strong men succeeded by a rising generation of opium smokers, who indulged to such an extent that their mental and physical powers were alike wasted. Then followed a fearful increase of gambling and dakoity.” England herself has seen the need of checking the consumption of opium among her Indian subjects, as a mere financial measure. The same material ruin is of course going on in China; for China is now not only the consumer of 7,000 tons of British opium annually, but also the producer of at least an equal amount. The result is an immense perversion of Chinese territory to poppy cultivation, as well as an immense drain of money from the country, a decrease of food crops, and an impoverishment of the soil. Thus China grows financially poorer as the process goes on. Even England herself does not escape the effects of the great “financial blunder.” British merchants and manufacturers long ago discovered that the opium trade, in whatever form, would inevitably undermine the general commerce of Great Britain with China. Such is indeed the fact, and hence we have a new application of Pharaoh's dream—the ill-favored and lean kine eating up the well-favored and fat kine, and the thin and blasted ears devouring the rank and full ears. English trade with China is feeling the natural reaction of a selfish disregard of the golden rule. Second. The physical effects of the opium habit upon the consumers are too well known to require more than a few words. The testimony of medical men is unanimous as to its destructive influence upon the human frame. The following sentiment may be taken as expressing the view of medical men in England: “However valuable opium may be when employed as an article of medicine, it is impossible for any one who is acquainted with the subject to doubt that the habitual use of it produces the most pernicious consequences, destroying the healthy action of the digestive organs, weakening the powers of the mind as well as those of the body, and rendering the individual who indulges in it a worse than useless member of society. I cannot but regard those who promote the use of opium as an article of luxury as inflicting the most serious injury upon the human race.” It is also conceded that the habitual use of opium affects the population by producing sterility. The Chinese claim that about one-half of regular opium smokers are childless, and that the family of the smoker will be extinct in the third generation. Physicians—like Dr. H. H. Kane, of New York, who has made the subject a special study—confirm the statement that sterility is the result. Mr. C. A. Bruce, English superintendent of tea plantations in Assam, implored the British Government to prevent the cultivation of opium in that territory, and adds: “If something is not done, the immigrants from the plains will soon be infected by the opium mania, that dreadful plague which has depopulated this beautiful country.” Third. The moral effect of the opium habit, of course, transcends all others in importance, and the testimony against it is unanimous, conclusive, and overwhelming. Sir Thomas Wade, whose long residence in China, whose attainments in the language, and whose official position at Pekin, entitle him to confidence, says: “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. It takes possession more insidiously and keeps its hold as tenaciously. I know of no case of radical cure. It has issued in every case within my knowledge, in a steady descent, moral and physical, of the smoker, and is so far a greater mischief than drink.” Dr. Williams, with a still wider range of experience, confirms this testimony. An opium eater recently came under the writer’s own observation, and the confession was, that as soon as the effect had passed away, and reaction had begun, every fiber of her system cried for more, and there was no crime she would not commit, if necessary, to secure it. An anti-opium society composed of Chinamen at Canton, in a paper to the anti-opium society of England, in a peculiarly anti-climactic statement, thus summarizes the effects of the drug: “It squanders wealth, interrupts industry, destroys life, cramps talent, disorganizes government, enfeebles the army, loosens the bonds of society, corrupts the morals of the people, and is an evil beyond description.” “Hence,” say they, “it is unworthy England's character, a breach of international friendship, an obstruction to missionary work, and contrary to the Bible.” And then, with a stinging irony which the House of Lords ought to feel, these heathen remind their English brethren that the New Testament says: “Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so to them.” “Is it possible,” they add, “that the instruction of the Saviour has never reached the ear of your honored country?” The question now forces itself upon us, What is the morality of England's opium policy? what are England's grounds of defense? We must discriminate between the Christian sentiment of the English people and the commercial sentiment of the English Government. England is a complex body, foremost in noble philanthropies and Christian missions, foremost also in the passion for power and in the greed of gain. Christian England could never have done what political and commercial England has. The first grand plea is generally on the ground of necessity. How else can we secure $40,000,000 a year to keep the Government of India in running order? Abolish the trade, and the deficit must be met. India cannot be educated; a government of justice cannot be maintained; cheap postage and railroads and telegraph lines cannot be introduced; a sufficient police force cannot be kept up! Very likely, but what a confession! To maintain a British Government in India, the Government of China must be bullied and crippled, and its possessions wrenched away by force of arms. To administer justice in India, injustice must be forced upon China at the mouth of English cannon. To support a police force and a standing army of 200,000 men; to sustain cheap postage and ten thousand miles of railroad and twenty thousand miles of telegraph line in India; $670,000,000 in twenty years must be taken out of China, against the continued protest of her Government, for a drug which produces only impoverishment and moral death. To educate, yes, possibly to Christianize, 200,000,000 in British India, 300,000,000 of people must be debauched and damned in China! That is the logic of the whole matter. When the emperor was urged to legalize the traffic, he said: “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.” Compare the English standard of morals in this matter with the remarkable letter of Li Hung Chang, addressed, in 1881, to the Anglo-Oriental Society for the suppression of the opium trade. He says: “The sense of injury which China has so long borne with reference to opium, finds some relief in the sympathy which a society like yours, existing in England, bespeaks. Opium is a subject in the discussion of which England and China can never meet on common ground. China views the whole question from a moral standpoint; England, from a fiscal. I may take the opportunity to assert here, once for all, that the single aim of my Government in taxing opium will be in the future, as it has been in the past, to repress the traffic, never to gain a revenue from such a source. Having failed to kill a serpent, who would be so rash as to nurse it in his bosom?” Another ground of justification claimed by the English has always been the alleged insincerity of the Chinese in opposing the traffic. Chinese officers connived at the trade and partook of the profits. The smuggling and piracy was largely carried on through the treachery of Chinese lower officials, and this, said Lushington in Parliament, acquitted the smugglers. But surely the treachery of these bribed and corrupted Chinamen no more proves the Government insincere in its opposition to opium, than does the secret violation of the Maine law by the connivance of a few policemen with rumsellers prove the insincerity of the legislation of that State. But beyond all this, when 20,000 chests of English opium, worth ten million dollars, which might have been appropriated to Government use, had been captured, and when Lin referred to the emperor for orders as to the disposition of it, his majesty commanded the whole to be destroyed in the presence of the civil and military officers, the inhabitants of the coast, and the foreigners, “that they may know and tremble thereat.” A sublime spectacle indeed, and a “solitary instance in the history of the world,” says Dr. Williams, “of a pagan monarch preferring to destroy what would injure his subjects, rather than to fill his own pockets with its sale.” Other defensive arguments have been urged which only show the imbecility of really able men when defending a bad cause. Take the following: “The opium traffic is not yet proved to be worse than the liquor traffic at home.” Or this: “The habit of opium smoking was begun in China before England imported the drug.” That is, Adam sinned before Judas, therefore Judas is excusable.—James Brand, D. D., in Bibliotheca Sacra.