Note 178 — XV. (continued 2)

According to MacCulloch's Commercial Dictionary, opium had been introduced into China and India by the commencement of the 16th century by Mahometan merchants, and it sounds like an apology when the learned and patriotic author, in treating of the part taken by England in the much-to-be-lamented traffic in this noxious drug, adds by way of palliation—"A century and a half before the English had anything whatever to do with its cultivation."—(Latest edition, p. 939.)