Note 16 — APPENDIX: AGRICULTURE IN FILIPINAS

See Jagor’s chapter (Reisen, pp. 309, 310) on the opium monopoly which was established in Filipinas on Jan. 1, 1844, and later continued by the Spanish government, after much discussion and controversy. Various arguments of policy, health, and morality were brought forward on both sides, but that which finally triumphed was evidently the one thus stated by the governor-general, “The revenue from opium is indispensable for our treasury.” The use of opium in the islands was intended for the Chinese residing there (being forbidder to the Indians and mestizos), and then only under certain restrictions; but Jagor found that, besides the 478 public opium-joints—which were “actual hotbeds of immorality, and always full of Chinese”—hundreds of individuals were allowed, contrary to the law and to the intentions of the government, to smoke opium in their own houses. The revenue from opium amounted in 1860 to 98,000 escudos; in the fiscal year of 1865–66, to 140,000; and in 1866–67, to 207,000. Montero y Vidal cites in Archipiélago filipino (published in 1886), the tariff schedule of 1874, “The importation of opium is prohibited; and only that will be allowed which, in small quantities, is destined for the pharmacies, and all that which may be imported by the lessees of the right to sell this drug to whom the Treasury has granted that exclusive right in the provinces there—in which case it will pay duty according to item 80” (that is, at eight per cent). ↑