THE EFFECTS OF OPIUM-EATING.
THE fifty-seven members of Parliament who wish to abolish the Opium monopoly in Bengal must get up their case a great deal better, before they can hope to make a serious im- pression upon English public opinion. At present most of their arguments are so visibly contradictory, and many of their facts so obviously open to question, that the average Englishman rejects them altogether, and overlooks in his annoyance an argument which might influence him, but which they fail to use. They declare, for instance, that opium is a poisonous drug, which injures the physique of every race which consumes it, and that the selling of it is an act of immorality discreditable to a Christian government. And therefore they ask that the Government of India should change their present method of taxing the drug, which prevents its sale in Eastern India, and greatly restricts its sale in China, for another method which would allow its sale in India, and make it somewhat cheaper to the Chinese. Surely their asssumption if at all well founded, should lead up to a resolution to prohibit the cultiva- tion of the drug at any cost of money throughout the British dominions. If it is wrong to sell it, morally wrong, so wrong that selling it is only a profitable form of criminality, it is wrong to allow its sale, even when weighted by an excise and a heavy export duty. We do not tax prussic acid in England, or arsenic, or any of the virulent poisons, but prohibit their sale, except on the written order of a qualified medical practitioner,—and that, the poisonous character of a drug once granted, is the only righteous course. It may be wise, or use- ful, or beneficial to tax opium as we do in Bombay instead of taxing it as we do in Bengal, but to raise a fiscal improvement of that sort to the dignity of a moral question is simply silly.
It is as if the philanthropists who attacked slavery had pleaded that a slave ought to be considered realty and not personalty, and transferred like an estate and not like a chattel, and had attributed to that alteration in the law a high moral claim. Not only, however, do the assailants of the monopoly refuse to draw the conclusion logically necessary from their preinisses, but they actually argue that the monopoly presses unduly on the peasants of Behar, by restricting the cultivation of the poppy. They state in the same speeches that opium is an in- jurious drug, which cannot rightfully be sold except as medScine, and that the Government is oppressive because it restricts the quantity of the drug available for consumption. It is wrong to sell arsenic because people may kill themselves with it, and wrong to restrict the manufacture of arsenic because artisans might profit by a larger sale of the means of suicide! All that is palpable nonsense, which will never induce an English House of Commons to run the political risks involved in the loss or serious diminution of the Opium revenue. That risk is not, it is true, the risk with which tie advocates of the traffic always frighten Parliament,—viz., The bankruptcy of the Indian Treasury. That Treasury would not be bankrupt if the Chinese to-morrow took, like the Styrians, to arsenic ; or like the Peruvians, to coca; or like the Scotch and Swedes, to corn- spirit, as a substitute for opium. The Government of India would in that case either have to force a paper cur- rency on the Empire, which no doubt might be done up to a certain very considerable amount, or to tax tobacco till the Opium deficit was supplied. In either case, it would have to risk immense and dangerous discontent, lasting perhaps for ten years, but it would not have to risk bankruptcy, or anything approaching bankruptcy. It would have a serious campaign the more to fight, but that would be all. If the argument of the opponents of the traffic is well-founded, the extinction of the traffic might be worth that risk ; and if not, then not, but in no case can a difference between one mode of taxation and another be worth any such hazard, or any serious interference with an experiment so huge and so hope- ful as the drilling of India into civilisation. The only reasonable alternatives are prohibition, or taxation in any method which Indian experts think most profitable to the State. They at present prefer taxation through monopoly, and as monopoly gets rid of the annoyances inflicted by an excise which would be needful to prevent smuggling, they are probably in the right. If we could get our revenue by an export duty only, that would be best; but we could not, for the drug would reach China by a hundred land routes, and mono- poly therefore weighs less upon the people. There is no nuisance conceivable like an excise upon a drug which can be carried anywhere in a man's waistband, and can be traced only by incessant domiciliary and personal inspections. Such an excise would in Bengal lead to police oppressions such as Would cause and justify popular insurrections. The drug will bear any carriage, the duty must be enormous, and no man or woman walking eastward from the poppy districts would ever be safe.
We maintain firmly that as between monopoly and taxation there is no moral question at all ; that, as Sir George Campbell said with great cleverness, the existing system is precisely the Gothenburg system of dealing with the whisky trade—official intervention, for the sake of reducing the evil to a minimum-- but on the subject of prohibition we confess to much more doubt. The officials seem to us to press the case in favour of the moral right of decent men to sell opium much too far. That the physical evils arising from opium-eating may be exaggerated is no doubt true, and we incline to believe, after years of study of the evidence adduced by experts, that they have been exaggerated in a very curious way. Opium affects all patients in England more or less in the same way, and it has therefore been imagined that it affects all men throughout the world alike ; but that is not the case. It is probable that, like whisky, it has a different effect on different races. Scotchmen and Swedes drink too much whisky ; but to say that whisky destroys Scotchmen and Swedes, is a rhetorical exaggeration. The liquor does not make them as races less strong, less brave, or less prolific. But it is nevertheless a certainty that whisky can kill out some races, such as Red Indians, some tribes in the South Seas, and it is probable, thnugh not quite proved, some castes of law vitality in India itself. Similarly opium, and especially Indian opium—which is extremely "mild," and therefore little used in medicine—does not appear permanently to injure the Chinese of the Delta, who hays taken to it by a kind of instinct, and may find in it a probes- tion against fatigue and malaria, such as the Peruvians Sad in coca ; while it kills out the Assamese, and we greatly fear would kill out the Bengalees of the Gangetic Delta, who, were the drug but cheap, would be under the same atmospheric temptation as the Chinese. The physical case against the drug is therefore, we agree with the officials, not sufficient to justify a grave interference with human liberty ; but there remains the moral one, and this, with all deference to Lord G. Hamilton, is not as clear as he thinks. It is possible that the moral effect of opium varies, like its physical effect, in correspondence to unknown conditions of race and climate ; but it is not certain that it does, and the presumption from the analogy of whisky—which produces just the same moral effect on a Scotchnaan and a Cherokee, though the physical effect is different—is that it does not. If it does not, if opium affects all minds alike, then the case for its prohibition is exceedingly strong. Lord G. Hamilton would hardly allow bhang—a drug which produces in ninety-nine men out of a hundred an access of homicidal mania, and is therefore eaten by sepoys—to be sold in England ; and opium, to a different way, is not much more defensible. A European opium-eater is almost certain to become a liar, a coward, and an egotist of the worst type. The drug paralyses the will, deadens the conscience, and destroys the sense of difference between right and wrong, till character rots under its effect. We know we shall have Coleridge flung in our teeth, but even in his case the effects were most injurious, and we can confidently appeal to the Lancet to say whether, in professional opinion, we have at all over-stated our case. If that case is correct, and those consequences arise not from the abuse but from the habitual use of opium, the argument for prohibition would be very strong,—would, in fact, reduce itself to a calculation whether prohibition was, as a practical mea- sure, possible. It is certainly possible in India, for it is very nearly accomplished, the drug being altogether out of the reach of the mass of the people ; and it might be accom- plished in China, were the Government of Pekin honestly dis- posed to insist on suppression. We do not believe they are, holding with Sir G. Balfour, that their hatred of the trade is not hatred of the drug, but hatred of the loss of money to the country—they could not cultivate it at home, any more than we could grow Regalias in Ireland—but still they could prohibit it if they chose ; and if the effects are as we have
stated, then they ought to have their chance. That is the point,—the universality of the moral evil produced by the drug, its extent, and its character,—which requires evidence, and to which the enemies of the trade should direct their attention. They will make nothing of its physical effects, and can in no case make anything of their present contention, which is merely that one mode of taxation is criminal, while another would be perfectly innocent. If they could show that the monopoly extended the sale of the drug, there might be some- thing in their allegations; but in spite of their assertions about Pegu, which we confess we do not believe, the facts are notori- ously against them. The Indian monopoly of opium is a crushing tax on the consumption of the drug, and a perfect security against adulteration.
To complete our argument, we may mention that the British have no direct power to prevent the consumption of opium by the Chinese,—a fact which has an important bearing on the moral question. China might prohibit import from any other State, but if she did not, and if we prohibited it, Turkey would supply it, and her rayahs would be relieved instead of our ryots ; or if Turkish negligence proved incurable, the planters of the Southern States of the Union would very soon avail themselves of so splendid a source of income. There is nothing whatever that we can think of to prevent a Virginian or a Carolinian from shipping opium just as good as that of Behar, and grown from the same plants, to Shanghai or Hong Kong ; and some fine day that may prove the sudden solution of a con- troversy which has been raging for nearly a century, and is not one whit nearer to a settlement than ever. It certainly never will be settled while the opponents of the trade stultify themselves by their "judicious," and "moderate," and " rea- sonable " method of opposition. They have not an argument to produce which does not condemn themselves for promoting the increase and diffusion of an immoral and injurious trade.
Previous page
