THE LOTOS EATERS

THE members of the Royal Commission on Opium have assembled at Bombay after their pleasant cold-weather picnic in the strange land of the lotos eaters, where it is always afternoon, and are preparing to return to England with the evidence they have gathered regarding the use and abuse of the poppy, which represents the mystical tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which our first parents were too timid and too simple to taste. Like the messengers of Lars Porsena, the Commission have hurried North, South, East and West. Their ingenuous questionings have been answered, in diverse tones and languages, from far Rangoon and Mandalay to Lahore, the immemorial capital of the North. The mild-eyed, melancholy lotos eaters of the Deltas have given their testimony, and the stalwart men of the sword who form the backbone of our armies, Sikhs, Rajputs, and Mahamadans of the Punjab and the North-West, have also had their say in their own straightforward fashion. What they have thought of the Opium Commission who can say? The Eastern mind is not in sympathy with Western ideas; their thoughts are not our thoughts, and they have long given up the attempt to understand us. The Indians regard their white rulers with a respectful but distant curiosity. An Indian of high intelligence was asked by an English friend what his people generally thought of us. 'We look on you,'

he replied, 'as monkeys, and never know what you are going to do next.' This was before he had made the acquaintance of the Opium Commission, but his latest experience would have only sharpened the point of a comparison which was not intended to be uncomplimentary. The monkey is an object of respect and worship, and is associated with the griefs and triumphs of the most popular of Hindu divinities.

But however incapable the Indian may be of understanding the eccentricities of his rulers, the failure is not due to want of intelligence, but to a natural ignorance of the sources from which these eccentricities spring. In his comparatively happy country he has had, till lately, when impulsive M.P.'s have overrun India, no experience of the arts of the professional politician and the wirepuller. His imagination has never realised a Secretary of State, hunted by enthusiastic busybodies with votes in the House, hiding himself behind VOL. XXXV-No. 205

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subterfuge after subterfuge, till, in a moment of inspired desperation, he suggested a Royal Commission which should both delay the catastrophe and draw it down on the heads of his enemies-a new Samson crushing the Philistines in the ruined temple of Gaza.

There were men of sound sense who were indignant at the appointment of a Royal Commission to determine facts already apparent to all who were not wilfully blind, and who failed to appreciate the rich vein of humour possessed by Lord Kimberley, which renders him both the most agreeable and the most open-minded member of the present Administration. He, like every sensible man, knew well that a Royal Commission on Opium was an absurdity; but with the official instinct of Secretaries of State and other animals of the chase which only survive by superior cunning, he foresaw that its appointment, with power to take evidence and extract the truth without fear or favour, would be obnoxious to the fanatics of the Anti-Opium Association, and bring about their assured confusion and collapse.

What had they to do with truth? It was the very last thing they wished to hear. Year in, year out, from one platform to another, in town and country, their voices had been repeating fictions and misrepresentations regarding opium in China and in India, the wars that it had caused, and the death and degradation that resulted from its use. Over and over again these fictions had been exposed and denied; but there was no cessation in the flood of misrepresentation; till, at last, by the sheer force of reiteration, a great number of emotional and uninformed Englishmen and Englishwomen began to believe in the false prophets; the Anti-Opium League became, as it were, a banner under which to fight the powers of darkness, and the dulness of middle-class English life was illumined by the glory of a holy war against vice in Asia.

Poor, simple, honest hearts! They did not know that, judged by any truthful standard, the people of India were on a far higher level of morality than Englishmen; that they were industrious, sober, chaste and religious; that a drunken man was rare, unless he were an Englishman; and that a drunken woman was unknown. Yet, in the name of virtue, a crusade was to be launched against opium, a harmless luxury and often a necessary stimulant, by a people the highways of whose capital were choked by prostitutes, and the illumination of whose streets was the flaring gaslights of the gin palaces at every

corner.

Is it to be supposed that the members of the Commission did not see the irony of the situation? Some, doubtless, did; others were glad of an opportunity to see the East under the pleasantest of auspices. and at the expense of other people, with the delicious prospect of posing in the House of Commons through all future time as authorities. on India. As if the secrets of that sad Land of Regrets are surrendered to travelling M.P.'s, with notebook and Gladstone bag. But I neither

wish to cavil at the composition of the Commission nor at the wholesome work it has done. The nomination of its Chairman and President, Lord Brassey, was unexceptionable. He is a man of robust patriotism, who thoroughly understands the management of a yacht in dirty weather, and who would make an excellent First Lord of the Admiralty in any Administration for which he was not too honest. Of opium and its history he naturally knew nothing; nor had he been accustomed to weigh evidence given, in great part, by witnesses of strange races, with whose ideas and modes of thought he was altogether unfamiliar. But hypercriticism would be out of place when it was perhaps impossible to appoint an ideal chairman such as the head of some great brewery. Then England and India would have alike recognised that the Government was inspired by a sincere love of virtue in its interference with the liberty of the people, and acknowledged that in condemning opium it had not forgotten that its first duty was to prohibit alcohol, the curse of England, which filled our gaols and penitentiaries and lunatic asylums, which degraded our people, morally and physically, and made us a byword among the nations.

I do not intend in this article to discuss the disputed points of the opium controversy. This has been already done in great detail, and those who desire to make themselves acquainted with the views of Sir Joseph Pease and the Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade, on the one hand, and of experts like Sir John Strachey, Surgeon-General Sir William Moore, Sir George Birdwood, Mr. H. Lay, and Sir Thomas Wade, on the other, cannot do better than procure a copy of the Blue Book containing the evidence taken in London before the Commission in September last, which has been already laid before Parliament. What I wish now to point out is the general tendency of the evidence which has been collected in India by the Commission, of which we have received sufficient summaries in the Times, not to mention briefer telegraphic accounts of the daily proceedings of the Commission. It may be urged that any inquiry of this sort would be more appropriate when the Commission had returned and their labours were recorded in a second Blue Book. But it is now that a protest is most likely to be heard. The British public does not study Parliamentary Blue Books, and is not likely to see the evidence recorded. The Anti-Opium Society will certainly not circulate it for the information of those whom their statements have so long misled; and, in any case, a future exhaustive examination of the evidence will in no way be prejudiced by some preliminary remarks on the work of the Commission and the Indian aspect of the subject.

I am as anxious for the facts to be known and realised as the Anti-Opium Society is to conceal them, and I particularly invite the attention of all members of Parliament (for the question is altogether

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outside party politics) to the results of the Indian inquiry, in order that they may not be again taken by surprise when the matter comes before the House. I have had unusual opportunities of studying the opium question, both in the Punjab and in Central India, where, for many years, as head of the Administration, one of my most responsible duties was to act as agent in the collection of between two and three millions of Imperial Revenue from opium grown in the Native States. It was incumbent on me to master the whole course of the opium trade, the effects of the drug on its habitual users, the economical advantages or disadvantages of poppy cultivation to the people and their rulers, the improvement in the manufacture of the drug, the prevention of smuggling on the frontiers of British India, and many kindred subjects. My practical acquaintance with the subject has not diminished the indignation which any impartial and well-informed person must feel at the statements which the Anti-Opium Society has scattered broadcast against the people and Government of India, and I wish those who take an interest in the controversy, and who have been inclined to believe the statements so industriously circulated, to understand that the great majority of responsible and informed. witnesses, English and native, who have given their evidence before the Royal Commission in India, have fully confirmed the statements which were made before the Commission in England by Sir John Strachey, Sir George Birdwood, and myself. They have borne testimony to the temperate habits of the Indian people, and that consequently opium is taken in moderation, not in excess; that its results are beneficial and not injurious; and that, in many unhealthy districts, it is a necessary rather than a luxury; that the races who use it most are the healthiest, strongest, and most warlike in India; and that the Government system of controlling the growth of the poppy and the manufacture of opium is amply sufficient to prevent any injury to the people by abuse of the drug.

The Anti-Opium Society make a great point of the admitted policy of the Government to discourage the excessive use of opium, and pretend that this policy fully justifies their crusade in favour of prohibition. But the argument is mere sophistry. No one denies that the excessive use of opium is highly injurious, as is the excessive use of spirits or wine; while those who have most experience of opium consumers assert that its moderate use is not injurious and is often beneficial. The Government are surely logical and enlightened when they restrict the sale and increase the price, so as to allow a moderate use and discourage excess. The opposite system is seen in Russia, where drunkenness is directly encouraged by the Government; while in England the Chancellor of the Exchequer is only too glad for the country to drink itself into a surplus. A good many witnesses before the Commission declared that the practice of opium eating was injurious, and that the habit was an unmitigated evil and should be

prohibited; but few of these were of much weight, while their statements carried with them their own refutation. Mr. Mookerjee, for example, a Bengali medical practitioner, attributed to the use of opium the diminution of the courage and physical stamina of Sikhs, Rajputs, and Goorkhas—an astonishing announcement, which Lord Roberts would hardly endorse; while Mr. Pillai, a Madras schoolmaster, admitted, in the true spirit of the Anti-Opium Society, that he could not distinguish between moderation and excess.

The efforts of the Society to secure substantial evidence, though unsuccessful, were so energetic that they almost deserved to succeed. Mr. W. S. Caine, M.P., an active member of the Society, seems, by his own account, to have addressed 130 Indian correspondents on the subject of the Commission. One of his letters was published through the vanity of the addressee, Hamid Ali Khan, who is known to me as an empty-headed man, altogether without influence in the Mahamadan community, but who happens to be chairman of the National Congress at Lucknow. It may be assumed that many of Mr. Caine's correspondents were National Congress men, for these are almost the only people whom a travelling M.P. would be likely to influence, as they are generally opposed to the Government and ready to perform any service in return for the promise of parliamentary support to their revolutionary schemes. Thus writes Mr. Caine:

I shall look to you to get us up some really good evidence on the whole scope · of this inquiry. We ought out of this Commission to get a good many important reforms in the administration of the Opium Department, and, at all events, we ought to kill and bury the entire trade in opium-smoking compounds (sic). Of course, the financial question is our great difficulty, and we in England thoroughly understand that if there is to be anything in the shape of absolute prohibition, we shall have to bear the main portion of the burthen.

Did Mr. Caine, when he held out this financial bribe to Indian intriguers, consider that he was acting fairly? To abolish the opium trade and compensate Native States and the interests injured would require one hundred millions sterling at least. Mr. Steel, Chairman of the Chamber of Commerce, before the Royal Commission. at Calcutta, estimated the capitalized amount at two hundred millions sterling. How can Mr. Caine assert that England would bear the main portion of the burden? He must know well it is not so. It is extremely improbable that England would ever consent to pay sixpence to abolish a trade the agitation against which is only maintained by ignorance and fanaticism.

See again the famous Bombay petition of the doctors and medical practitioners, which was a trump card of the Anti-Opium Society. It would appear to be a bogus petition, and the manner in which the signatures were obtained is disclosed in the Bombay telegram of the 14th of February in the Daily News.