IT is gratifying to all lovers of purity to understand that there is at present, a hopeful prospect that the disreputable opium traffic, which this country, to its shame, has carried on for many years with China, will soon be brought to an end. On the 30th of May last, the House of Commons passed a resolution declaring that the traffic was morally indefensible, and the Secretary for India, where the opium poppy is grown, intimated in the House, that, if the Chinese were really desirous to stop the consumption of opium, the British and Indian Governments would agree to take the necessary action on their part, although the reform would mean a considerable loss of revenue. Since this date, the Chinese Government has issued an edict prohibiting the use of opium, both foreign and native, within ten years, and making provision to put an end to the cultivation of the opium plant. Opium, as is well known, has been the curse of China, a curse all along recognised by the Chinese themselves; and it bodes well for the future material, moral, and spiritual prosperity of that great and industrious empire, that this pernicious evil is likely to be soon largely, if not wholly, stamped out. May the Lord hasten the day!
As many of our readers may be unacquainted with the history of the opium traffic, a brief account of the same may not be inappropriate on the present occasion. For our information we are mainly indebted to a book, entitled, The Imperial Drug Trade, recently written by Mr. Joshua Rowntree, who has evidently made an exhaustive study of the subject, and writes in an able and impressive manner.
A word or two first, as to the nature of opium, and the effects it has upon its victims. Opium is a drug that has its own proper place in the chemist’s shop, and is well known in liquid form as morphia. It is valued for medicinal purposes, but requires very careful administration, and so, when sold, it is labelled poison. Employed in this way as a chemical drug, it serves a useful and beneficent purpose, but absorbed in eating or smoking as a luxury, it proves to be ruinous in the last degree to the body and mind of man. Alcohol, when taken to excess, is bad enough in its consequences, and we would not wish for a moment to minimise the danger that is in connection with it; but opium, remarkable to say, is very much worse. It obtains even a more perfect mastery over its victim, and is more demoralising and debilitating in its effects. A reliable authority declares—”There is no use and abuse of opium; it is all abuse. In the eyes of the Chinese the use of opium as a luxury and stimulant . . . is a vice from first to last.” We cannot enter here into a minute description of its effects. Suffice it to state that, though more injurious than drink, it acts in a different way: drink tends to deeds of violence, but opium soothes its victims and disables them from active exertion. It casts them into a stupor and sleep, demoralises their minds in a most degrading manner, reduces their frames to skeletons, and predisposes a great number of them to suicide. Its ravages are so dreadful that a Chinese author wrote that surely the Supreme Ruler intended to destroy the nation “in causing opium smoking.” The Chinese nation as a whole has been against the practice from the beginning, and no victim is heard to make an apology for it. Most lamentable then to find that eastern civilized nations, and our own among them, are very largely responsible for the spread of the opium vice in China. The following sketch will show this very clearly.
It appears that Arab traders were the first to introduce opium among other drugs into India and China. Though the opium poppy may have been indigenous to China as well as Arabia, yet it has always been regarded as a foreign medicine, and is popularly known as “foreign smoke.” “Its early use was evidently that of a drug,” and it was not till the latter part of the fifteenth century that it came to be manufactured to any extent in China. Even then and long after there was no general consumption of it. The use of opium received its first great impetus with the introduction of opium smoking, probably about the beginning of the eighteenth century. The first account of this habit refers it to the island of Formosa. But it rapidly spread on the continent of China with such disastrous effects upon the people, that, in 1729, an edict was issued by the Government “prohibiting the sale, and the opening of opium smoking houses.” Sellers of opium were subjected to the severest penalties, to the extent of strangulation after a period of imprisonment, and all who had anything to do with the trade had a punishment assigned them. “Only the opium smoker was exempted,” being evidently regarded as an object of pity, whose vice was a sufficient punishment in itself. There now began a contraband trade with opium which pursued its way very persistently and successfully owing to the corruption of Chinese officials.
In order to stem this evil tide more effectually, the Emperor in 1799 issued an edict “prohibiting the importation of the drug, as well as its vicious use among the people.”
The British opium trade first originated with the servants of the English East India Company, one of whom started a factory at Patna in India. This man carried on the trade for ten years, and amassed the large sum of about £100,000. The Company came to know of his success, and took over the trade into its own hands, “leasing the monopoly to one or more native contractors.” This took place some time about 1703. In 1729, as already stated, the first Chinese edict was issued against the sale of opium, and here began a most extraordinary policy on the part of the English East India Company. They recognised that they were dealing in “a pernicious article of luxury” strongly prohibited by the Chinese Government, and they positively forbade sending the opium to China, but favoured the establishment of a trading station in the eastern islands, whence the opium would readily find its way into China, “without the Company being exposed to the disgrace of being engaged in an illicit commerce.” The Company thus started a double-faced policy which they pursued for many years. “Like Bunyan’s waterman, Mr. Facing-both-ways, the Company resolutely looked one way and rowed another.” They became promoters of smuggling on an extensive scale, which eventually led to serious conflict with the Chinese authorities. The latter were determined to put down the trade in opium; and our countrymen were determined to extend it. “The smuggling led to piracy,” and the British ships and boats were manned by crews armed to the teeth. By deception, force, and bribery, they pursued their unhallowed merchandise. While subordinate Chinese officials were either terrified or cajoled into complicity with the traffic, the Emperors, and all that was best in China, still remained immovably hostile to it. At length, in 1834, “the Reform Parliament brought the monopoly of the East India Company in the Chinese trade to an end, and gave all English traders liberty to sail the Eastern seas.” They also appointed superintendents of trade in those waters. But this new regime effected no reformation in the opium traffic. The smuggling continued to proceed as formerly, until at last reprisals between our merchantmen and the Chinese authorities led to the first Opium War in 1839. The British were victors, and a treaty of peace was signed in August, 1842. The evils of smuggling opium were in no wise diminished, they only increased by the advantages the British had gained; and thus fifteen years afterwards there arose a second Opium War. The town of Canton fell, “the Peiho forts were captured, and Tientsin occupied.” The Earl of Elgin was sent out to negotiate peace. He saw that prohibition of opium was hopeless, and he had the only alternative left to urge upon the Chinese delegates, the legalisation of the opium trade. The British had been all along pressing upon the Chinese this proposal, but their moral sense revolted against it, and it was only by the force of British influence that they at last yielded. This took place in 1859. Lord Elgin’s Letters and Journals bear lamentable testimony to the scandalous character of our countrymen’s behaviour in the East. The following are a few brief quotations: —”I thought bitterly of those who, for the most selfish objects, are trampling underfoot this ancient civilisation . . . Canton doomed to destruction, through the folly of its own rulers, and the vanity and levity of ours . . . I have seen more to disgust me with my fellow-countrymen than I saw during the whole course of my previous life, since I have found them in the East . . . this abominable East; abominable, not so much in itself, as because it is strewn all over with the records of our violence and fraud. . . . In our relations with China we have acted scandalously.” This is the testimony of one who had the reputation of being “an honourable and humane man,” and it stirs up feelings of mingled grief and indignation. How sadly true it is that those who sin against the light and privileges of Christianity, are capable of sinking to a deeper degree of depravity and hardness of heart than the heathen who never had the same precious advantages! In this whole controversy the Chinese exhibited a better moral instinct than the British. The greed of gain seemed to blind our countrymen to every noble consideration.
We must defer our conclusion of this subject to another issue.
“He had a great Latitude.”—In these characteristic words the Laird of Brodie in his Diary describes Leighton, who became Bishop of Dunblane and afterwards Archbishop of Glasgow. Leighton is one of the most inexplicable figures in the checkered career of Scotland’s Church history. How a man of his saintly life failed to grasp the real issues that were at stake in Scotland at the second Reformation must remain a mystery. It must, however, be admitted that his saintliness was largely tinged with asceticism and he had a strange hankering after monasticism. Butler’s Life and Letters of Robert Leighton throw a flood of light on his ecclesiastical career. Mr. Butler leaves the reader in no doubt as to the fact that Leighton’s stay at Douay largely influenced him to have very charitable views of Popery, and the spell exercised over him by the Jansenists only deepened the impression. Leighton’s ambition was to bring the antagonistic parties together, and however noble his idealism was, it was but a visionary dream after all. The hardheaded determined men, who on lonely hillside and deep valley worshipped God, were the men who had seen the vision of God, and history has proved that with all their unbending sternness, their ideas moved along the great eternal lines of God’s purpose. The words of Brodie of Brodie may be the true secret of Leighton’s historic failure.