THE INDIAN GOVERNMENT AND THE OPIUM-TRADE.
Now we are upon the eve of a more extended intercourse with China, it is to be wished that the British Government in India should cease to be implicated in the opium-trade. Not because of a sentimental horror of opium, or because the British Government has any call or right to assist in enforcing the Chinese revenue- laws ; but because it is an awkward thing for a government to be actively engaged as a partner in commercial speculations. Opium is only allowed to be grown in the provinces of Bahar, Benares, and Malwa ; and in the two former the Government possesses and strictly enforces a right of preemption. The grower and preparer of opium in Behar and Benares must sell his opium to the Govern- ment, at a fixed price, and that much below the usual market-price. Before Malwa was included in the Company's territory, Government had literally a monopoly of opium : as the cultivation and sale of the drug is free in Malwa, its monopoly in Bahar and Benares is less valuable, but still it is a monopoly, and implicates the Govern- ment in mercantile pursuits. Such a position, even were the opium- trade free in China, would be apt to make the Chinese suspect, that in urging the liberation of commerce the Anglo-Indian Government was covertly promoting a sinister interest of its own : but, seeing that the importation of opium into China is a smuggling-trade, it necessarily leads them to regard the Indian Government as one of the smugglers. Smuggling by private specu- lators is merely a breach of the civil law by individuals ; but smug- gling by a state is an act of covert hostility, that may provoke open war. The Government monopoly of opium in India is objection- able on the same grounds that a similar monopoly in any branch of trade whatever would be, because it has a tendency to unsettle diplomatic arrangements—to render peace and international amity precarious. Every Government that turns merchant is in a false position. It is said that by relinquishing the monopoly of opium the Indian Government would lose a yearly million of its revenue: of course, if the monopoly be given up, some other means of re- venue must be substituted ; but this would be an immense gain for India ; experience having long shown that rights of preemption are the most oppressive to subjects and the least profitable to rulers of all methods of filling an exchequer.
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