The opium controversy.

  • Arbuthnot, Alexander John, 1822-1907.
Date:
1882
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The opium controversy. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    drawn from them altogether, he replied that the hypothesis involved a physical impossibility; and, when farther pressed, he stated that his ‘ mind coidd not estimate the result of facts which it considered to be impossible.’ Nearly eleven years have elapsed since this evidence was given, but the subsequent course of events has shown that it is quite as applicable to the situation in 1882 as it was to the situation in 1S71. During the interval the cultivation of the drug in China has steadily increased, and even the Chinese ministers who still profess a desire to suppress opium-smoking admit, as Sir Thomas Wade reported last year, that the habit is too confirmed to be stopped by official intervention.2 There cannot now be the shadow of a doubt that if the exportation of the drug from India were entirely suppressed, the expansion of the cultivation of opium in China, com- bined with the impetus which the demand for the Indian drug would speedily give to the exportation of opium from other countries, such as Persia, Turkey, and Mozambique, in no very great space of time would fill up the gap caused by the suppression of the Indian opium trade; a result which would hardly be more satisfactory to those who are now intent upon destroying the trade, than it would be to the perplexed administrators of Indian finance. Alexander J. Arbuthnot.