Drugging a Nation Part 6

We have seen, in the preceding chapters, that the Anglo-Indian government controls absolutely the production of opium in India, prepares the drug for the market in government-owned and government-operated factories, and sells it at monthly auctions. Let me also recall to the reader that four-fifths of this opium is prepared to suit the known taste of Chinese consumers. The annual value to the Anglo-Indian government of this curious industry, it will be recalled, is well over $20,000,000.

Now we have to consider the last strong defense of this policy which the British government has seen fit to offer to a protesting world, the report of the Royal Commission on Opium. Against this stout defense of the opium traffic in all its branches, we are able to set not only the findings of other governments, such as those of j.a.pan, the Philippines, and Australia, which have opium problems of their own to deal with, but also the curious att.i.tude of a certain British colony, amounting almost to what might be called an opium panic, on that occasion when the Oriental drug found its way near enough home to menace British subjects and British children.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WEIGHING OPIUM IN A GOVERNMENT FACTORY, INDIA]

The men who administer the government of India have a chronically difficult job on their hands. In order to keep it on their hands they have got to please the British public; and that is not so easy as it perhaps sounds. It would apparently please both the government and the public if the whole opium question could be thrown after the twenty thousand chests of Canton--into the sea. But the British public is hard-headed, and proud of it; and the spectacle of the magnificent, panoplied government of India gone bankrupt, or so embarra.s.sed as to be calling upon the Home government for aid, would not please it at all. Of the two evils, debauching China or gravely impairing the finances of India, there has been reason to believe that it would prefer debauching China. That, at least, is what successive governments of Britain and of India seem to have concluded. It has seemed wiser to endure a known quant.i.ty of abuse for sticking to opium than to risk the cold British scorn for the bankrupt; and, accordingly, the Indian government with the approval of one Home government after another, has stuck to opium. The only alternative course, that of developing a new, healthy source of revenue to supplant opium, the unhealthy, would involve real ideas and an immense amount of trouble; and these two things are only less abhorrent to the administrative mind than political annihilation itself.

But there came a time, not so long ago, when a wave of "anti-opium"

feeling swept over England, and the British public suddenly became very hard to please. Parliament agreed that the idea of a government opium monopoly in India was "morally indefensible," and even went so far as to send out a "Royal Commission" to investigate the whole question. Now this commission, after travelling twenty thousand miles, asking twenty-eight thousand questions, and publishing two thousand pages (double columns, close print) of evidence, arrived at some remarkable conclusions. "Opium,"

says the Royal Commission, "is harmful, harmless, or even beneficial, according to the measure and discretion with which it is used.... It is [in India] the universal household remedy.... It is extensively administered to infants, and the practice does not appear, to any appreciable extent, injurious.... It does not appear responsible for any disease peculiar to itself." As to the traffic with China, the Commission states--"Responsibility mainly lies with the Chinese government." And, finally (which seems to bring out the pith of the matter), "In the present circ.u.mstances the revenue derived from opium is indispensable for carrying on with efficiency the government of India."

To one familiar with this extraordinary summing-up of the evidence, it seems hardly surprising that the Rt. Hon. John Morley, the present Secretary of State for India, should have said in Parliament (May, 1906)--"I do not wish to speak in disparagement of the Commission, but somehow or other its findings have failed to satisfy public opinion in this country and to ease the consciences of those who have taken up the matter."

The methods employed by a Royal Commission which could arrive at such remarkable conclusions could hardly fail to be interesting. The Government opium traffic was a scandal. Parliament was on record against it. There was simply nothing to be said for opium or for the opium monopoly. It was "morally indefensible"--officially so. It was agreed that the Indian government should be "urged" to cease to grant licenses for the cultivation of the poppy and for the sale of opium in British India. This was interesting--even gratifying. There was but one obstacle in the way of putting an end to the whole business; and that obstacle was, in some inexplicable way, this same British government. The opium monopoly, morally indefensible or not, seemed to be going serenely and steadily on.

If the Indian government was urged in the matter, there was no record of it.

Two years pa.s.sed. Mr. Gladstone, the great prime minister, deplored the opium evil--and took pains not to stop or limit it. Like the House of Peers in the Napoleonic wars, he "did nothing in particular--and did it very well." So the vigilant crusaders came at the government again. In June, 1893, Mr. Alfred Webb moved a resolution which (so ran the hopes of these crusaders) the most nearly Christian government could not resist or evade. Sure of the anti-opium majority, the new resolution, "having regard to the opinion expressed by the vote of this House on the 10th of April, 1891, that the system by which the Indian opium revenue is raised is morally indefensible,... and recognizing that the people of India ought not to be called upon to bear the cost involved in this change of policy,"

demanded that "a Royal Commission should be appointed ... to report as to (1) What retrenchments and reforms can be effected in the military and civil expenditures of India; (2) By what means Indian resources can be best developed; and (3) What, if any, temporary a.s.sistance from the British Exchequer would be required in order to meet any deficit of revenue which would be occasioned by the suppression of the opium traffic."

The crusaders had underestimated the parliamentary skill of Mr. Gladstone.

He promptly moved a counter resolution, proposing that "this House press on the Government of India to continue their policy of greatly diminishing the cultivation of the poppy and the production and sale of opium, and demanding a Royal Commission to report as to (1) Whether the growth of the poppy and the manufacture and sale of opium in British India should be prohibited.... (4) The effect on the finances of India of the prohibition ... taking into consideration (a) the amount of compensation payable; (b) the cost of the necessary preventive measures; (c) the loss of revenue....

(5) The disposition of the people of India in regard to (a) the use of opium for non-medical purposes; (b) their willingness to bear in whole or in part the cost of prohibitive measures."

Mr. Gladstone's resolution looked, to the unthinking, like an anti-opium doc.u.ment. He doubtless meant that it should, for in his task of maintaining the opium traffic he had to work through an anti-opium majority. Mr. Webb's resolution, starting from the a.s.sumption that the government was committed to suppressing the traffic, called for a commission merely to arrange the necessary details. Mr. Gladstone's resolution raised the whole question again, and instructed the commission not only to call particular attention to the cost of prohibition (the shrewd premier knew his public!), not only to find out if the victims of opium in India wished to continue the habit, but also threw the whole burden of cost on the poverty-stricken people of India--which he knew perfectly well they could not bear. The original resolution had sprung out of a moral outcry against the China trade. Mr. Gladstone, in beginning again at the beginning, ignored the China trade and the effects of opium on the Chinese.

But more interesting, if less significant than this att.i.tude, was the suggestion that the Indian government "continue their policy of greatly diminishing the cultivation of the poppy." Now this suggestion conveyed an impression that was either true or false. Either the Indian government was putting down opium or it was not. In either event, if Mr. Gladstone was not fully informed, it was his own fault, for the machinery of government was in his hands. The best way to straighten out this tangle would seem to be to consult the report of Mr. Gladstone's commission. This commission, on its arrival in India, found no trace of a policy of suppressing the trade. Sir David Balfour, the head of the Indian Finance Department, said to the commission: "I was not aware that that was the policy of the Home government until the statement was made.... The policy has been for some time to sell about the same amount every year, neither diminishing that amount nor increasing it. I should say decidedly, that at present our desire is to obtain the maximum revenue from the opium consumed in India."

As regarded the China trade, Sir David added: "We will not largely increase the cultivation because we shall be attacked if we do so." And this--"We have adopted a middle course and preserved the _status quo_ with reference to the China trade."

Mr. Gladstone's resolution was adopted by 184 votes to 105, the anti-opium crusaders voting against it. And the Royal Commission, with instructions not, as had been intended, to arrange the details of a plan for stopping the opium traffic, but with instructions to consider whether it would pay to stop it, and if not, whether the people of India could be made to stand the loss, started out on its rather hopeless journey.

One thing the crusaders had succeeded in accomplishing--they had forced the government to send a commission to India. They had got one or two of their number on the body. The commission would have to hear the evidence, would be forced to air the situation thoroughly, showing a paternal government not only manufacturing opium for the China trade, but actually, since 1891, manufacturing pills of opium mixed with spices for the children and infants of India. If the Indian government, now at last brought to an accounting, wished to keep the opium business going, they could do two things--they could see that the "right" sort of evidence was given to the commission, and they could try to influence the commission directly. They adopted both courses; though it appears now, to one who goes over the att.i.tude of the majority of the commission and especially of Lord Bra.s.sey, the chairman, as shown in the records, that little direct influence was necessary. Lord Bra.s.sey and his majority were pro-opium, through and through. The Home government had seen to that.

The problem, then, of the administrators of the Indian government and of this pro-opium commission was to defend a "morally indefensible" condition of affairs in order to maintain the revenue of the Indian government. It was a problem neither easy nor pleasant.

The Viceroy of India was Lord Lansdowne. He went at the problem with shrewdness and determination. His att.i.tude was precisely what one has learned to expect in the viceroys of India. A later viceroy, Lord Curzon, has spoken with infinite scorn of the "opium faddists." Lord Lansdowne approached the business in the same spirit. He began by sending a telegram from his government to the British Secretary of State for India, which contained the following pa.s.sage: "We shall be prepared to suggest non-official witnesses, who will give independent evidence, but we cannot undertake to specially search for witnesses who will give evidence against opium. We presume this will be done by the Anti-Opium Society." This message had been sent in August, 1893, but it was not made public until the 18th of the following November. On November 20th Lord Lansdowne sent a letter to Lord Bra.s.sey, "which," says Mr. Henry J. Wilson, M. P., in his minority report, "was pa.s.sed around among the members [of the commission]

for perusal. It contained a statement in favour of the existing opium system, and against interference with that system as likely to lead to serious trouble. This appeared to me a departure from the judicial att.i.tude which might have been expected from Her Majesty's representatives."

From this Mr. Wilson goes on, in his report, to lay bare the methods of the Indian government in preparing evidence for the commission. To say that these methods show a departure from the expected "judicial att.i.tude"

is to speak with great moderation. It is not necessary, I think, to weary the reader with the details of these extended operations. That is not the purpose of this writing. It should be enough to say that Lord Lansdowne and his Indian government ordered that all evidence should be submitted to the commission through their offices; that only pro-opium evidence was submitted; that a government official travelled with the commission and openly worked up the evidence in advance; that the minority members were hindered and hampered in their attempts at real investigation, and were shadowed by detectives when they travelled independently in the opium-producing regions; and, finally, that Lord Bra.s.sey abruptly closed the report of the commission without giving the minority members an opportunity to discuss it in detail. The result of these methods was precisely what might have been expected. Opium was declared a mild and harmless stimulant for all ages. No home, in short, was complete without it.

There is an answer to the report of the Royal Commission on opium more telling than can be found in speeches or in minority reports. In an earlier article we examined into the beginnings of opium. We saw how it is grown and manufactured; how it pa.s.ses out of the hands of the British government into the currents of trade; how it is carried along on these currents--small quant.i.ties of it washing up in pa.s.sing the Straits and the Malay Archipelago--to China; how it blends at the Chinese ports in the flood of the new native-grown opium and divides among the trade currents of that great empire until every province receives its supply of the "foreign dirt." Now let us follow it farther; for it does not stop there.

The Chinese are great traders and great travellers. The weight of the national misery presses them out into whatever new regions promise a reward for industry. They swarmed over the Pacific to America in a yellow cloud until America, in sheer self-defense, barred them out. They swarmed southward to Australia until Australia closed the doors on them. They swarm to-day into the Philippines and into Malaysia. In the Straits Settlement, in a total population of a little over half a million, more than half (282,000) are Chinese. When America would build the Panama Ca.n.a.l, her first impulse is to import the cheap Chinese labourer, who is always so eager to come. When Britain took over the Transvaal she imported 70,000 Chinese labourers. And where the Chinese travel, opium travels too.

The real answer to the Royal Commission on opium should be found in the att.i.tude of these countries which have had to face the opium problem along with the Chinese problem. Let us include in the list j.a.pan, a country which has had a remarkable opportunity to view the opium menace at short range. What j.a.pan thinks about opium, what Australia and the Transvaal and the United States think, what the Philippines think, is more to the point than any first-hand statements of a magazine reporter. We will take j.a.pan first. Does j.a.pan think that opium is invaluable as a general household remedy? Does j.a.pan think that opium is good for children?

Here is what the Philippine Opium Commission, whose report is accepted to-day as the most authoritative survey of the opium situation, has to say about opium in j.a.pan:

"j.a.pan, which is a non-Christian country, is the only country visited by the committee where the opium question is dealt with in the purely moral and social aspect.... Legislation is enacted without the distraction of commercial motives and interest.... No surer testimony to the reality of the evil effects of opium can be found than the horror with which China's next-door neighbour views it.... The j.a.panese to a man fear opium as we fear the cobra or the rattlesnake, and they despise its victims. There has been no moment in the nation's history when the people have wavered in their uncompromising att.i.tude towards the drug and its use, so that an instinctive hatred possesses them. China's curse has been j.a.pan's warning, and a warning heeded. An opium user in j.a.pan would be socially a leper.

"The opium law of j.a.pan forbids the importation, the possession, and the use of the drug, except as a medicine; and it is kept to the letter in a population of 47,000,000, of whom perhaps 25,000 are Chinese. So rigid are the provisions of the law that it is sometimes, especially in interior towns, almost impossible to secure opium or its alkaloids in cases of medical necessity.... The government is determined to keep the opium habit strictly confined to what they deem to be its legitimate use, which use even, they seem to think, is dangerous enough to require special safeguarding.

"Certain persons are authorized by the head official of each district to manufacture and prepare opium for medicinal purposes.... That which is up to the required standard (in quality) is sold to the government: and that which falls short is destroyed. The accepted opium is sealed in proper receptacles and sold to a selected number of wholesale dealers (apothecaries) who in turn provide physicians and retail dealers with the drug for medicinal uses only. It can reach the patient for whose relief it is desired only through the prescription of the attending physician. The records of those who thus use opium in any of its various forms must be preserved for ten years.

"The people not merely obey the law, but they are proud of it; they would not have it altered if they could. It is the law of the government, but it is the law of the people also.... Apparently, the vigilance of the police is such that even when opium is successfully smuggled in, it cannot be smoked without detection. The pungent fumes of cooked opium are unmistakable, and betray the user almost inevitably.... There is an instance on record where a couple of j.a.panese lads in North Formosa experimented with opium just for a lark; and though they were guilty only on this occasion, they were detected, arrested, and punished."

That is what j.a.pan thinks about opium.

The conclusions of this Philippine Commission formed the basis of the new opium prohibition in the Philippines, which went into effect March 1, 1908. The plan is a modification of the j.a.panese system of dealing with the evil.

Australia and New Zealand have also been forced to face the opium problem.

New Zealand, by an act of 1901, amended in 1903, prohibits the traffic, and makes offenders liable to a penalty not exceeding $2,500 (500) for each offense. In the Australian Federal Parliament the question was brought to an issue two or three years ago. Pet.i.tions bearing 200,000 signatures were presented to the parliament, and in response a law was enacted absolutely prohibiting the importation of opium, except for medicinal uses, after January 1, 1906. All the state governments of Australia lose revenue by this prohibition. The voice of the Australian people was apparently expressed in the Federal Parliament by Hon. V. L.

Solomon, who said: "In the cities of the Southern States anybody going to the opium dens would see hundreds of apparently respectable Europeans indulging in this horrible habit. It is a hundredfold more damaging, both physically and morally, than the indulgence in alcoholic liquors."

That is what Australia and New Zealand think about opium.

The att.i.tude of the United States is thus described by the Philippine Commission: "It is not perhaps generally known that in the only instance where America has made official utterances relative to the use of opium in the East, she has spoken with no uncertain voice. By treaty with China in 1880, and again in 1903, no American bottoms are allowed to carry opium in Chinese waters. This ... is due to a recognition that the use of opium is an evil for which no financial gain can compensate, and which America will not allow her citizens to encourage even pa.s.sively." By the terms of this treaty, citizens of the United States are forbidden to "import opium into any of the open ports of China, or transport from one open port to any other open port, or to buy and sell opium in any of the open ports of China. This absolute prohibition ... extends to vessels owned by the citizens or subjects of either power, to foreign vessels employed by them, or to vessels owned by the citizens or subjects of either power and employed by other persons for the transportation of opium." Thus the United States is flatly on record as forbidding her citizens to engage, in any way whatever, in the Chinese opium traffic.

The last item of expert evidence which I shall present from the countries most deeply concerned in the opium question is from that British colony, the Transvaal. Were the subject less grim, it would be difficult to restrain a smile over this bit of evidence--it is so human, and so humorous. For a century and more, Anglo-Indian officials have been kept busy explaining that opium is a heaven-sent blessing to mankind. It is quite possible that many of them have come to believe the words they have repeated so often. Why not? China was a long way off--and India certainly did need the money. The poor official had to please the sovereign people back home, one way or another. If a choice between evils seemed necessary, was he to blame? We must try not to be too hard on the government official. Perhaps opium _was_ good for children. Keep your blind eye to the telescope and you can imagine anything you like.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WHERE THE CHINAMAN TRAVELS, OPIUM TRAVELS TOO A Consignment of Opium from China to the United States, Photographed in the Custom House, San Francisco]

The situation was given its grimly humorous twist when the monster opium began to invade regions nearer home. It came into the Transvaal after the Boer War, along with those 70,000 Chinese labourers. The result can only be described as an opium panic. I quote, regarding it, from that "Memorandum Concerning Indo-Chinese Opium Trade," which was prepared for the debate in Parliament during May, 1906:

"The Transvaal offers a striking ill.u.s.tration of the old proverb as to chickens coming home to roost.

"On the 6th of September, 1905, Sir George Farrar moved the adjournment of the Legislative Council at Pretoria, to call attention to 'the enormous quant.i.ty of opium' finding its way into the Transvaal. He urged that 'measures should be taken for the immediate stopping of the traffic.' On 6th October, an ordinance was issued, restricting the importation of opium to registered chemists, only, according to regulations to be prescribed by permits by the lieutenant-governor--under a penalty not exceeding 500 ($2,500), or imprisonment not exceeding six months.

"Any person in possession of such substance ... except for medicinal purposes, unless under a permit, is liable to similar penalties. Stringent rights of search are given to police, constables, under certain circ.u.mstances, without even the necessity of a written authority.

"The under-secretary for the colonies has also stated, 'that the Chinese Labour Importation Ordinance, 1904, has been amended to penalize the possession by, and supply to, Chinese labourers of opium.'"

Apparently opium is not good for the children of South Africa. That it would be good (to get still nearer home) for the children and infants of Great Britain, is an idea so monstrous, so horrible, that I hardly dare suggest it. No one, I think, would go so far as to say that the Royal Commission would have reached those same extraordinary conclusions had the problem lain in Great Britain instead of in far-off India and China. Walk about, of a sunny afternoon, in Kensington Gardens. Watch the ruddy, healthy children sailing their boats in the Round Pond, or playing in the long gra.s.s where the sheep are nibbling, or running merrily along the well-kept borders of the Serpentine. They are splendid youngsters, these little Britishers. Their skins are tanned, their eyes are clear, their little bodies are compactly knit. Each child has its watchful nurse. What would the mothers say if His Majesty's Most Excellent Government should undertake the manufacture and distribution of attractive little pills of opium and spices for these children, and should defend its course not only on the ground that "the practice does not appear to any appreciable extent injurious," but also on the ground that "the revenue obtained is indispensable for carrying on the government with efficiency"?

What would these British mothers say? It is a fair question. The "conservative" pro-opiumist is always ready with an answer to this question. He claims that it is not fair. He maintains that the Oriental is different from the Occidental--racially. Opium, he says, has no such marked effect on the Chinaman as it has on the Englishman, no such marked effect on the Chinese infant as it has on the British infant. I have met this "conservative" pro-opiumist many times on coasting and river steamers and in treaty port hotels. I have been one of a group about a rusty little stove in a German-kept hostelry where this question was thrashed out. Your "conservative" is so c.o.c.k-sure about it that he grows, in the heat of his argument, almost triumphant. At first I thought that perhaps he might be partially right. One man's meat is occasionally another man's poison. The Chinese differ from us in so many ways that possibly they might have a greater capacity to withstand the ravages of opium.

It was partly to answer this question that I went to China. I did not leave China until I had arrived at an answer that seemed convincing. If, in presenting the facts in these columns, the picture I have been painting of China's problem should verge on the painful, that, I am afraid, will be the fault of the facts. It is a picture of the hugest empire in the whole world, fighting a curse which has all but mastered it, turning for aid, in sheer despair, to the government, that has brought it to the edge of ruin.

Strange to say, this British government, as it is to-day const.i.tuted, would apparently like to help. But, across the path of a.s.sistance stands, like a grotesque, inhuman dragon,--the Indian Revenue.

VIII