the Government of Bengal to India." This letter is printed in the Appendix to the Report of the Select Committee on East India Finance, 1871, page 519; and to do the argument full justice we reprint here the most important paragraphs: —
"4. The objection founded on the imputation of immorality to which the Government is exposed under the present system is of little weight; were the imputation true, this would be a fatal objection, against which no financial arguments could stand; if the imputation could be supported on the foundation of fact with any show of reason, the objection would have weight; but there is neither truth nor show of truth in it; now, at all events, that the importation and cultivation of opium has been legalized by the Chinese Government, there remains no means of putting the imputation into a plausible form.
"5. The Lieutenant-Governor fully concurs with so much of the Board's remarks on this point, as go to show that the distinction, as a question of ethics, between raising a revenue from opium by an excise on consumption and a duty on exportation, and raising the same revenue by monopolizing the manufacture, is fanciful and false, whatever the truth may be as to the effect, on the whole, of eating and smoking opium in India and China. No person, whatever may be his views on the total abstinence question, has attempted to draw a moral distinction between the octroi on wine and the monopoly price of Government tobacco, to both of which modes of taxation consumers in many continental towns are subject. But the Board seem to the Lieutenant-Governor to overargue this point, when they attempt to prove that the proposed system of free manufacture would be infinitely injurious and demoralizing in comparison with the present system of monopoly. It is not at all necessary to the Board's conclusion that this argument should be established. It is not professed that 'under the existing system the quantity of opium is checked and limited by Government' on any consideration of the injurious and demoralizing effects of the use of opium; and to claim for this system any superiority on this ground would be to set up, and to set up unnecessarily, an unreal and unfair pretext. The same must be said of the plea in favour of the purity of the drug which is ensured by the present system, as compared with the perniciously adulterated article which it is assumed, contrary to experience in Malwa, would be produced under the proposed change of system. The truth is, that questions such as these do not properly belong to the subject. It is a fact as much beyond dispute, that the Chinese are consumers of opium on a large scale, as that Europeans consume wine, spirits, and tobacco on a large scale. It is also an ascertained fact that supplies of opium can and will be obtained by the Chinese, whether the people and Government of India assist in furnishing these supplies or not. There is no doubt that if the growth of the poppy were to cease in India altogether, the Chinese would still be opium-smokers, and would obtain from elsewhere, at home or
