LECTURE III.

In my last lecture I dealt with the fallacy that the poppy is not indigenous to China, but has recently been introduced there presumably by British agency, and that opium smoking in China was confined to a small percentage of the people, which had been steadily increasing since the introduction into China of Indian opium.

I now proceed to discuss fallacy number 3, which is, that “opium smoking is injurious to the system, more so than spirit drinking.” I think I shall be able to show most clearly that exactly the reverse is the case. With this it will be convenient to take fallacy number 5, which is a kindred one, namely, that “opium smoking and opium eating are equally hurtful.” This fallacy lies at the root of the opium controversy, for it alone has enabled the Anti-Opium agitators to give plausibility to their teaching and to obtain some hold, as they lately had, upon the public mind. There is, in truth, about as much difference in the two practices as there is between drinking, say, a pint of ardent spirits and bathing the surface of one’s body with the same stimulant. Before proceeding further, it may be stated that opium is admitted by physicians in all countries to be an invaluable medicine, for which there is no known substitute. Mr. Storrs Turner says that from the time of Hippocrates to the present day it has been the physician’s invaluable ally in his struggles against disease and death.

Pereira thus describes the drug:—

Opium is undoubtedly the most important and valuable remedy of the whole Materia Medica. For other medicines we have one or more substitutes, but for opium none,—at least in the large majority of cases in which its peculiar and beneficial influence is required. Its good effects are not, as is the case with some valuable medicines, remote and contingent, but they are immediate, direct, and obvious, and its operation is not attended with pain or discomfort. Furthermore it is applied, and with the greatest success, to the relief of maladies of everyday occurrence, some of which are attended with acute human suffering.

This is the description given of opium in Dr. Quain’s Dictionary of Medicine recently published:—

Opium and morphia naturally stand first and still hold their place as our most potent and reliable narcotics, all the more valuable because almost alone in their class they are also endowed with powerful anodyne action, in virtue of which they may relieve pain without causing sleep. Valuable as it is in all forms of insomnia, opium is especially indicated in typhus fever and other acute disorders, when delirium and prolonged wakefulness seem to endanger life. The principal drawback to opium is the digestive disturbance following its use, and the fact that, as toleration is very rapidly established, gradually increasing doses are needed to check the counteracting influence of habit.

The Anti-Opium Society and their followers allege that dram-drinking is not only less baneful than opium-smoking, but they say that the latter practice so injures the constitution, and has such extraordinary attractions for those who indulge in it, that it is impossible to get rid of the habit, and that, in effect, whilst drunkards can be reformed, opium smokers cannot. This is absolutely untrue. The reverse is much nearer the mark. The effect upon the system of constant spirit drinking, leaving actual drunkenness and its consequences aside, is that it produces organic changes in the system, by acting upon what medical men call the “microscopic tissues,” of which the whole human frame is made up; also poisoning the blood, which then, instead of being a healthy fluid coursing freely through the frame and invigorating the entire system, flows sluggishly, producing organic changes in the blood vessels, inducing various diseases according to the constitution and tendencies of the individual. Three of the most usual diseases to which the habitual dram drinker is subject are liver disease, fatty degeneration of the heart, and paralysis. There is not a medical student of three months’ experience who could not, if you entered a dissecting-room, point you out a “drunkard’s liver.” The moment he sees that object he knows at once that the wretched being to whom it belonged had, by continued indulgence in alcohol, ruined his constitution and health, and brought himself to an untimely end. There is another serious consequence arising from habitual drinking. Not only does the habit irreparably ruin the general health so that cure is impossible, but it induces insanity, and I believe I am not beyond the mark in stating that fifty per cent. at the least of the lunatics in our various asylums throughout the country have become insane from over-indulgence in alcohol. Dr. Pereira, in his celebrated Materia Medica, states that out of one hundred and ten cases occurring in male patients admitted into the Hanwell Lunatic Asylum in 1840, no fewer than thirty-one were ascribed to intemperance, while thirty-four were referred to combined causes of which intemperance was stated to be one; and yet Mr. Turner and his disciples say that spirit drinking is a lesser vice than opium smoking!

I need not remind you of the consequences to others besides the actual victims to spirit drinking, for that is unfortunately told too eloquently and but too vividly brought before us every day in the public newspapers. You will find that those acts of violence, those unfortunate cases that make one shudder to read, happening daily in this country—kicking wives, sometimes to death, beating and otherwise ill-using helpless children, violently attacking unoffending people in the streets—all are the results, more or less, of spirit drinking. Even the missionaries admit that opium smoking does not produce any of these evils. As I have said before, truth is natural to the human mind, and will reveal itself, even where it is not directly relevant to the purpose. Mr. Turner does not venture to dispute this in his book, and I would call your attention to the passage. He says on page 33:—

Even between drunkenness and opium smoking there are perceptible distinctions. We must allow that opium smoking is a much more pacific and polite vice. The opium sot does not quarrel with his mate nor kick his wife to death; he is quiet and harmless enough while the spirit of the drug possesses him.

That is all true so far as the fact goes, but if an insinuation is intended that the Chinaman gets violent after the effect of the drug has passed away, there is no foundation for it in fact. The Chinaman takes opium just because he likes it, and knowing it will act at once as a pleasing sedative and a harmless stimulant. A man who is working hard all day in a tropical climate, whether at bodily or mental work, finds, towards the close of the day, his nervous system in an unsettled state, and looks for a stimulant, and the most harmless and most effectual one he can find is the opium pipe. When opium and opium smoking are better understood—and I believe the subject is now but imperfectly known by most medical men in this country—I feel convinced that the faculty will largely prescribe opium smoking, not merely as a substitute for dram drinking, but as a curative agency, that in many cases will be found invaluable. In this I am borne out by an eminent medical authority, to whom I shall refer by-and-by. The regular and habitual opium smoker is seldom or never found to indulge in spirits at all. Stimulants of all kinds are so freely taken here that people never look upon them as a poison; but in point of fact they are a terrible poison, and a very active one, too. Another medical work of very great authority is that by Dr. Taylor.[7] It has always received the greatest attention in courts of law; and it is also held in the highest estimation by the medical profession. At page 315, under the head of “Poisoning by Alcohol,” he says:—

The stomach has been found intensely congested or inflamed, the mucous membrane presenting in one case a bright red, and in another a dark red-brown colour. When death has taken place rapidly, there may be a peculiar odour of spirits in the contents; but this will not be perceived if the quantity taken was small, or many hours have elapsed before the inspection is made. The brain and its membranes are found congested, and in some instances there is effusion of blood or serum beneath the inner membrane. In a case observed by Dr. Geoghegan, in which a pint of spirits had been taken and proved fatal in eight hours, black extravasation was found on the mucous membrane of the stomach; but no trace of alcohol could be detected in the contents. The action of a strong alcoholic liquid on the mucous membrane of the stomach so closely resembles the effect produced by arsenic and other irritants, as easily to give rise to the suspicion of mineral irritant poisoning. A drawing in the museum collection of Guy’s Hospital furnishes a good illustration of the local action of alcohol. The whole of the mucous membrane of the stomach is highly corrugated and is of a deep brownish-red colour. Of all the liquids affecting the brain this has the most powerful action on the stomach. A case of alcoholic poisoning of a child, æt. seven, referred to me by Mr. Jackaman, coroner for Ipswich, in July 1863, will serve to show the correctness of this remark. A girl was found at four o’clock in the morning lying perfectly insensible on the floor. She had had access to some brandy, which she had swallowed from a quartern measure, found near her empty. She had spoken to her mother only ten minutes before, so that the symptoms must have come on very rapidly. She was seen by Mr. Adams four hours afterwards. She was then quite insensible, in a state of profound coma, the skin cold, and covered with a clammy perspiration. There had been slight vomiting. The child died in twelve hours, without recovering consciousness, from the time at which she was first found.

So far Dr. Taylor, a most competent authority on the subject, as showing what a poison alcohol is. Now alcohol, as I have before mentioned, effects an organic change in the system, which opium, if smoked, or even if eaten does not; and when spirits are indulged in to a very considerable extent, the disease produced is absolutely incurable, because it is impossible for any medical skill to give a man new tissues, new blood, a new stomach, or a new liver, where the whole substance and material of all has undergone a complete and ruinous change. Now, the case as regards opium is totally different, because, no matter how much one may indulge in opium, whether in eating or smoking, the effects produced are always curable. This is so as regards opium eating; in respect to the infinitely less exciting practice of opium smoking, the rule applies with very much greater force. A man may smoke opium inordinately until, from want of appetite and impaired digestion, he seems sinking into the grave; he is, however, only labouring under functional derangement, which is always curable. The use of opium in any form produces no organic change in the system whatever. Excessive eating or smoking opium may impair the appetite and digestion, but that will be all. I have very competent medical authority for saying this. This fact places opium and alcohol in two entirely different categories. The one, if eaten in moderation, is, I believe, harmless, if not beneficial; while, as to the smoking of the drug, it is absolutely innocuous;—but if alcohol be freely though not inordinately used, it will prove, sooner or later, destructive to the system, acting upon the frame as a slow poison, which must eventually end, as experience shows, in ruin and death. De Quincey tells us in his Confessions that he ate opium with impunity for eighteen years, and that it was only after eight years abuse of opium eating that he suffered in any way from the practice.

I will now give you another extract from Dr. Pereira’s book. At page 446, under the heading “Consequences of Habitual Drunkenness,” he says:—

The continued use of spirituous liquors gives rise to various morbid conditions of system, a few only of the most remarkable of which can be here referred to. One of these is the disease known by the various names of delirium tremens, d. potatorum, oinomapria, &c., and which is characterized by delirium, tremor of the extremities, wakefulness, and great frequency of pulse. The delirium is of a peculiar kind. It usually consists in the imagined presence of objects which the patient is anxious to seize or avoid. Its pathology is not understood. It is sometimes, but not constantly, connected with or dependent on an inflammatory condition of the brain, or its membranes. Sometimes it is more allied to nervous fever. Opium has been found an important agent in relieving it. Insanity is another disease produced by the immoderate and habitual use of spirituous liquors.

Now I do not think that, much as they have abused opium smoking, any of the Anti-Opium writers have ever alleged insanity to be an effect or concomitant of opium smoking. It must therefore be taken as generally admitted that opium smoking, or even opium eating, does not produce insanity. We have, then, this undisputed fact, viz. that insanity and acts of violence do not result from opium smoking, whilst they are unquestionably produced by spirit drinking.

I had recently some conversation on the subject of opium with a medical friend who has been in large practice in London, for twenty years. I had previously spoken to him frequently on the same subject, and he has been kind enough to give me his views in a very interesting and concise manner. This opinion, I may tell you, is not paid for, or prepared merely to support a particular purpose, as in the case of trials in the law courts. It is purely spontaneous. We all know that professional men, whether doctors, lawyers, surveyors, and others, are all more or less prone to take the views of the party requiring their services, and they, accordingly, will give opinions more or less coinciding with those views. It does not, however, follow that the persons doing so are guilty of any moral wrong, or that they write or state what they do not believe to be true; on the contrary, they have a complete faith in the statements they make. The natural bent of the mind is to lean towards the views urged by one’s patient or client; and thus two physicians or lawyers of the highest standing and character will be found to hold different opinions. But this statement with which I have been furnished stands on an entirely different footing. There can have been no bias in the mind of the writer; it is simply the result of study and experience. I have the most perfect confidence in this gentleman’s opinions. He is Mr. William Brend, M.R.C.S. He says:—

There is no organic disease traceable to the use of opium, either directly or indirectly, and whether used in moderate quantities or even in great excess. In other words, there is no special disease associated with opium. Functional disorder, more or less, may be, and no doubt is, induced by the improper or unnecessary use of opium; but this is only what may be said of any other cause of deranged health, such as gluttony, bad air, mental anxiety....

However great the functional disorder produced by opium, even when carried to great excess, may be, the whole effect passes off, and the bodily system is restored in a little while to a state of complete health, if the habit be discontinued. Alcohol, when taken in moderation, unquestionably benefits a certain number of individuals, but there are others whose systems will not tolerate the smallest quantities; it acts upon them like a poison. But in the case of all persons when alcohol is taken in excess disease is sooner or later produced; that disease consists of organic changes induced in the blood-vessels of the entire system, more especially the minute blood-vessels called the capillaries; these become dilated, and consequently weakened in their coats, and eventually paralyzed, so that they cannot contract upon the blood. The result of this is stagnation, leading to further changes still, such as fatty degeneration of all the organs; for it must be remembered that alcohol circulates with the blood, and thus finds its way into the remotest tissues. The special diseases referrable to alcohol, besides this general fatty degeneration, are the disease of the liver called “cirrhosis,” and very frequently “Bright’s disease of the kidneys.” Here, then, we have a great and important difference between opium and alcohol. The second great difference grows out of the first. It is this:—I have said that if alcohol be taken in excess for a certain length of time, depending to some extent upon the susceptibility of the individual, organic change, that is disease, is inevitable; but the saddest part of it is that it is real disease, not merely functional disorder; so that if those who have yielded to that excess can be persuaded to abandon alcohol entirely the mischief induced must remain. The progress of further evil may be staved off, but the system can never again be restored to perfect health. The demon has taken a grip which can never be entirely unloosed. Herein there is the second great difference between the use of opium and of alcohol in excess.

If what I have said of opium eating be true, common sense will draw the inference that opium smoking must be comparatively innocuous, for used in this way, a very small quantity indeed of the active constituents find their entrance into the system. Its influence, like tobacco, is exerted entirely upon the nervous system, and when that influence has passed off it leaves (as also in the case of tobacco) a greater or less craving for its repetition; but as organic disease is not the result, I see no reason why opium smoking in moderation necessarily degrades the individual more than does the smoking of tobacco.

Here I will give you another extract from Mr. Storrs Turner’s book, which tells against his case very strongly indeed. How he came to insert it I can only understand on the principle I have already mentioned, that truth is inherent to the human mind and will reveal itself occasionally even though it has to struggle through a mountain of prejudice and of warped understanding. This is it, from the evidence of Dr. Eatwell, First Assistant Opium Examiner in the Bengal service; it will be found on page 233:—

Having passed three years in China, I may be allowed to state the results of my observation, and I can affirm thus far, that the effects of the abuse of the drug do not come very frequently under observation, and that when cases do occur, the habit is frequently found to have been induced by the presence of some painful chronic disease, to escape from the sufferings of which the patient has fled to this resource. That this is not always the case, however, I am perfectly ready to admit, and there are doubtless many who indulge in the habit to a pernicious extent, led by the same morbid impulses which induce men to become drunkards in even the most civilised countries; but these cases do not, at all events, come before the public eye. It requires no laborious search in civilized England to discover evidences of the pernicious effects of the abuse of alcoholic liquors; our open and thronged gin-palaces, and our streets afford abundant testimony on the subject; but in China this open evidence of the evil effects of opium is at least wanting. As regards the effects of the habitual use of the drug on the mass of the people, I must affirm that no injurious results are visible. The people generally are a muscular and well-formed race, the labouring portion being capable of great and prolonged exertion under a fierce sun, in an unhealthy climate. Their disposition is cheerful and peaceable, and quarrels and brawls are rarely heard amongst even the lower orders; whilst in general intelligence they rank deservedly high amongst Orientals. I will, therefore, conclude with observing, that the proofs are still wanting to show that the moderate use of opium produces more pernicious effects upon the constitution than does the moderate use of spirituous liquors; whilst, at the same time, it is certain that the consequences of the abuse of the former are less appalling in their effect upon the victim, and less disastrous to society at large, than are consequences of the abuse of the latter.

Could any evidence against the allegations of the Anti-Opium Society be stronger than this? Have I not now a right to say, “Out of the mouth of thine own witness I convict thee!”

My own observation goes to show that opium smoking is far more fascinating than opium eating, and that the opium smoker never relapses into the opium eater. Opium eating, as I think I have already stated, is unknown in China. I think these statements put the question as regards opium smoking, opium eating, and spirit drinking in a very different light to what the advocates of the Anti-Opium Society throw upon the subject. The latter talk of the importation of Indian opium into China as the origin of the custom of smoking the drug, or, at the least, that it has made the natives smoke more than they otherwise would have done. There is no truth in such representations. Let us take the year 1880, for instance, and adopting the figures given by Sir Robert Hart, and concurred in by the British merchants, which I take to be quite correct, that the amount of opium imported into China from India was in that year one hundred thousand chests, each chest weighing a pikul, which would amount to about six thousand tons. Distribute those six thousand tons over the whole of China, which, as I have before so often said, is as large as Europe, and with a population amounting to three hundred and sixty millions, and you will find it gives such a trifling annual amount to each person, that Sir Robert Hart cannot mark from its use any damage to the finances of the State, the wealth of its people, or the growth of its population. In the United Kingdom, where we have less than a tenth of the population of China, there were two hundred thousand tons of alcohol—whisky, gin, brandy—and one thousand and ninety millions four hundred and forty-four thousand seven hundred and sixteen gallons of wine and beer consumed in that year. If all these spirits, wine, and beer were mixed up so as to form one vast lake—one huge “devil’s punch-bowl”—there would be sufficient liquor for the whole population of the United Kingdom to swim in at one time. But if the tears of all the broken-hearted wives, widows, and orphans that flowed from the use of the accursed mixture were collected, they would produce such a sea of sorrow, such an ocean of misery as never before was presented to the world. Yet philanthropists and Christian people in this country give all their time, energies, and a great deal of their money to put down this purely sentimental grievance in China, and shut their eyes to the terrible evils thundering at their own doors!

The whole purpose of Mr. Storrs Turner’s book, and of the Anti-Opium Society, is to write down opium smoking in China, with the ultimate view of suppressing the Indo-China opium trade; and no man living is better aware than Mr. Turner that opium eating is not a practice with the Chinese; indeed, I doubt if it is known in China at all. Yet, knowing all this, he puts forward the outrageous theory that opium smoking and opium eating are equally injurious; it therefore becomes a matter of the first importance that the great difference between these two practices should be clearly shown. In the appendix to Mr. Turner’s book there is a mass of evidence, of which a large portion is quite beside the question, for it applies exclusively to opium eating—a practice, I assert and will clearly show, is totally different from, and a thousand times more trying to the constitution than opium smoking. Dr. Ayres says that opium smokers can smoke in one day as much opium as would, if eaten, poison one hundred men, and Dr. Ayres is a very great authority on the subject; for not only has he a large practice among the better classes of Chinese, all of whom are, more or less, opium smokers, but his daily duties bring him into contact with the criminal classes, who are most prone to excessive sensual indulgence of this kind.

This is what Dr. Ayres says upon the subject in his article in the Friend of China:—

As regards opium smoking, no prisoner who confessed to be an opium smoker has been allowed a single grain in the gaol. Neither has he had any stimulant as a substitute, and I do not find there has been any evil consequence in breaking off this habit at once, nor that any precaution has been necessary, further than a closer attention to the general health. Several very good specimens of opium smokers have come under observation; one was the case of a man whose daily consumption had been two ounces a day for nineteen years, and who was allowed neither opium nor gin, nor was he given any narcotic or stimulant. For the first few days he suffered from want of sleep, but soon was in fair health, and expressed himself much pleased at having got rid of the habit.... In my experience, the habit does no physical harm in moderation. In the greatest case of excess just mentioned at the gaol, a better-nourished or developed man for his size it would be difficult to see.

So far as regards opium eating, the best medical authorities are divided as to whether opium eating or drinking in moderation is injurious to the system at all. In any case, opium eating is not the question before us, nor the subject of these lectures, which is opium smoking in China. Mr. Storrs Turner gives, in his appendix, at page 240, extracts from some statements of Lieut.-Col. James Todd, who says:—

This pernicious plant (the poppy) has robbed the Rajpoot of half his virtues, and while it obscures these it heightens his vices, giving to his natural bravery a character of insane ferocity, and to the countenance which would otherwise beam with intelligence an air of imbecility.

That entirely relates to the eating of the drug by the Rajpoots of India, and has no connection or analogy to opium smoking by the Chinese. There is another quotation on the same page from Dr. Oppenheim, given in Pereira’s Materia Medica as follows:—

The habitual opium eater is instantly recognised by his appearance: a total attenuation of body, a withered, yellow countenance, a lame gait, &c.

And so on. This, as you see, applies to opium eating only. There are many other instances of the effects of such use of opium given in the appendix, which, after these two quotations, it is useless to further repeat. Indeed, so far as relevancy to his subject goes, Mr. Storrs Turner might just as well have introduced into his book medical or other testimony as to the effects of gluttony or spirit drinking. It suits his purpose, however, to mix up the two practices, so as to confuse and mislead his readers. Dr. Oppenheim’s statement, by the way, is completely refuted by Dr. Sir George Birdwood, a distinguished physician, whose long residence in Bombay,—where there is a Chinese colony, most, if not all, of whom are habitual smokers of the drug,—and whose thorough acquaintance with the effects of opium eating and opium smoking, entitle his testimony to the very highest consideration. Again, at p. 8 of Mr. Turner’s volume, reference is made to De Quincey’s book on opium eating, intituled, “The Confessions of an English Opium Eater.” Could anything be more disingenuous than this? De Quincey was an opium eater, not an opium smoker. Here is the passage from Mr. Turner’s book to which I have referred:—

Those “Confessions,” which are not confessions, but an apologia pro vitâ suâ, an elaborate essay to whitewash his reputation and varnish over the smirching blot of a self-indulgent habit by a glitter of a fascinating literary style.

Now did anyone ever hear of such an extraordinary explanation of De Quincey’s motives in publishing that volume? De Quincey, he says, in effect, was ashamed of the practice of opium eating, and wrote the book as an excuse for his conduct, so horrible, disgraceful, and debasing, according to Mr. Storrs Turner, is—not opium eating, observe you, but—opium smoking. How fallacious are such arguments I think I shall make apparent to the most simple mind. If a man has the misfortune to have contracted a disgraceful habit, such, for instance, as over-indulgence in spirit drinking, the very last thing he would think of doing is to publish a book upon the subject, and thus acquaint the whole world with his infirmity. Yet this is what Mr. Turner alleges against De Quincey. But, in point of fact, he is altogether wrong in supposing that De Quincey was ashamed of opium eating; if he had been, he unquestionably would not have written his book, which, by the way, is one of the most fascinating volumes in our literature. Previous to the publication of it, probably there were not half a dozen people who knew that he, De Quincey, was an opium eater, and in the preface to the work, he says, “that his self-accusation does not amount to a confession of guilt.” I know Mr. Turner to be a gentleman utterly incapable of wilfully acting disingenuously, much less of stating intentionally what he knew to be untrue; but he is so blinded by prejudice, his naturally clear intellect is so warped and distorted, and his faculties and reasoning powers are so perverted, by this opium question, and his duties towards the Anti-Opium Society, that he either does not see the difference between the two things,—opium smoking and opium eating,—or, aware of that difference, thinks himself justified in classing them together, as they both proceed from opium, and thus he would persuade himself and his readers that they are equally baneful. But in this book of his he takes De Quincey, the opium eater, who confesses to having eaten three hundred and twenty grains a day, and compares him with an opium-smoking Chinaman who smoked one hundred and eighty grains a day; the difference between eating three hundred and twenty grains and smoking one hundred and eighty grains a day being about as a thousand is to one, in fact, in such case it would be simply the difference between life and death; and yet Mr. Storrs Turner would strive to mix up the two practices, so that the incautious reader might infer that the effects of the one were as injurious as those of the other. Such is the class of arguments with which the Anti-Opium Society and its credulous supporters have been satisfied, and upon which the whole religious world, the country, and the legislature are called upon to come to the rescue of injured humanity, and abolish this Indo-China opium trade.

Now, as De Quincey is on the tapis, I cannot refrain from exposing a very disgraceful piece of deception which has been practised upon the public by some of the agents or supporters of the Anti-Opium Society since the first edition of my Lectures appeared. This work of De Quincey, as I have intimated, is a very entertaining book; it is the first of a series of fourteen volumes by the same author, published in 1880 by the eminent firm of Adam and Charles Black, of Edinburgh; the price of each volume is two shillings, which is very moderate indeed, taking the character and quality of the letterpress, the paper, and general “get up” into account, for, as for the copyright, it has expired. Although Mr. Storrs Turner has mis-described the book as a penitential effort on the part of De Quincey, I am afraid that the effect of its perusal on most readers would be to induce them rather to become opium eaters than repel them from the practice, as will be manifest from an extract which I shall shortly give the reader. The truth is, De Quincey, who knew human nature very well, lived by his pen, and was actuated more by the desire to amuse than reform his readers—for, say as you will, a well presented comedy will be always more popular with the multitude than a tragedy, however skilfully performed. Now, I am far from impugning the main features of our author’s “confessions,” but in saying that in writing this very fascinating and original book he went extensively into the picturesque, and drew largely on his imagination, no person who will afford himself the pleasure of reading the book can, I think, deny. Now, some very zealous agent or advocate of the Anti-Opium Society, fearing that the effect of this work of De Quincey’s—brought as it has been into notice in connection with this controversy by Mr. Turner’s and my own book—might be to induce the reading public to think that opium, after all, was not so terrible a drug as the Anti-Opium agitators represent, has set himself to the ignoble task of so garbling the work, and importing into it other matter of his own, as to represent opium eating as the most terrible, fearful, and demoralizing practice in the world, and then printing the concoction and flooding the country with the impudent travesty at the very moderate charge of one penny. All the entertaining and diverting passages have been suppressed, and some wretched stuff inserted. It is called on the title page “The Confessions of an Opium Eater; the famous work by Thomas De Quincey. Copyright edition.” The whole is nothing more than a burlesque—and a very bad one indeed—of the real volume. In the first place, there is a lie upon the face of it, as the copyright has expired, and it is not in any respect a copy of the original; and secondly, it barely contains one-sixth of the matter of the actual volume, and has “counterfeit” stamped upon every page. It was exposed at the various book-stalls of Messrs. W. H. Smith and Son, in London, and, I believe, also throughout the country. I myself bought two copies at the Charing Cross station a few months ago, but I believe the delectable piece of literary forgery has since been withdrawn. I daresay, however, it has, to a great extent, answered its purpose, i.e. to poison the minds of its readers on the Opium question, by making it appear that opium is a terrible poison, and that the smoking of it is more injurious than the excessive indulgence in alcohol. This “pious fraud” has done a grievous wrong to the memory of a great English author, Thomas De Quincey—whose pure and classic English adorns our language—and also an injury to the general public who have advanced their money for the penny lie upon false pretences. The whole affair is just as defensible a proceeding as that of some tenth-rate dauber who, having copied (?) a masterpiece of Sir Joshua Reynolds, or some other great master of the English school, had the miserable caricature oleographed, and flooded the country with the imposture, in the hope of inducing the public to believe that true copies of the originals were offered to them. But these Anti-Opium fanatics do not stick at trifles, and, in their insane desire to make right appear wrong, do not hesitate to defame the dead and vilify the living. I have mentioned this incident to show my readers the unscrupulous efforts these people will resort to in order to impose their fictions upon the public.

Now, leaving De Quincey and his book for the present, let us see what Dr. Ayres says upon the difference between opium eating and opium smoking. In his article in The Friend of China, from which I have already quoted, he says:—

I have conducted my observations with much interest, as the effects of opium eating are well known to me by many years’ experience in India, and I have been surprised to find the opium smoker differs so much from the opium eater. I am inclined to the belief that in the popular mind the two have got confused together. Opium smoking bears no comparison with opium eating. The latter is a terrible vice, most difficult to cure, and showing rapidly very marked constitutional effects in the consumer.

Dr. Ayres was quite right, the two have got mixed up together, thanks to Mr. Storrs Turner and his confrères. To further explain the difference between opium eating and opium smoking, let us take the familiar instance of tobacco smoking. It is not, I think, generally known that tobacco, taken internally, is a violent and almost instantaneous poison. A very small quantity of it admitted into the stomach produces speedy death, and it is a wonder to some medical men that its use has not been made available by assassins for their foul and deadly purposes. Tobacco has no medicinal properties; it is simply known to chemists and physicians as a poison. Its alkaloid, or active principle, is nicotine, a poison of so deadly and instantaneous a nature as to rank with aconite, strychnine, and prussic acid. Of the four, indeed, it takes the lead. In Taylor’s “Medical Jurisprudence,” to which I have already referred, it is laid down at page 321, under the head of “Poisoning by Tobacco”:—

The effects which this substance produces when taken in a large dose, either in the form of powder or infusion, are well marked. The symptoms are faintness, nausea, vomiting, giddiness, delirium, loss of power in the limbs, general relaxation of the muscular system, trembling, complete prostration of strength, coldness of the surface with cold clammy perspiration, convulsive movements, paralysis and death. In some cases there is purging, with violent pain in the abdomen; in others there is rather a sense of sinking or depression in the region of the heart, passing into syncope, or creating a sense of impending dissolution. With the above-mentioned symptoms there is dilatation of the pupils, dimness of sight with confusion of ideas, a small, weak, and scarcely-perceptible pulse, and difficulty of breathing. Poisoning by tobacco has not often risen to medico-legal discussion. This is the more remarkable as it is an easily accessible substance, and the possession of it would not, as in the case of other poisons, excite surprise or suspicion. In June, 1854, a man was charged with the death of an infant, of ten weeks, by poisoning it with tobacco. He placed a quantity of tobacco in the mouth of the infant, with the view, as he stated, of making it sleep. The infant was completely narcotized, and died on the second day.... Tobacco owes its poisonous properties to the presence of a liquid volatile alkaloid, nicotina.

Whilst under the head “Nicotine,” on the same page, he says:—

This is a deadly poison, and, like prussic acid, it destroys life in small doses with great rapidity. I found that a rabbit was killed by a single drop in three minutes and a half. In fifteen seconds the animal lost all power of standing, was violently convulsed in its fore and hind legs, and its back was arched convulsively.

In Dr. Ure’s “Dictionary of Arts, Manufactures, and Mines,” it is laid down, at page 250, under the head of “Nicotine”:—

This alkaloid is the active principle of the tobacco plant.... Nicotine is a most powerful poison, one drop put on the tongue of a large dog being sufficient to kill it in two or three minutes.

So much for tobacco and its alkaloid as deadly poisons; yet we all know that, unless indulged in to an inordinate extent, tobacco smoking is a perfectly harmless practice, almost universally indulged in; the exception now being to find a man, young or old, gentle or simple, who is not a tobacco smoker. Most of our greatest thinkers, philosophers, poets, statesmen, and mathematicians smoke it, and in most cases, I believe, with advantage. Indulged in moderately, it does no injury to the constitution, but I should rather say its effects are curative and beneficial; you will rarely find a heavy tobacco smoker a drunkard or even a spirit drinker. Yet this plant, which gives comfort and delight to millions of people, is a deadly poison if taken internally in even a minute quantity in its natural or manufactured state. So it is with opium; the habitual eating of it may be injurious, but the smoking is not only innocuous, but positively beneficial to the system. It is a complete preservative against dram drinking and drunkenness, for whilst it produces similar but far more agreeable effects on the nervous system than wine, it does not, like alcohol, poison the blood, destroy the health, and lead to ruin, disgrace, and death. Of course, opium-smoking, like every other luxury—tea, wine, spirits, beer, tobacco—may be abused, but the few who indulge excessively are infinitesimally small as compared with the many who abuse the use of alcoholic liquors. As to opium eating, an overdose produces death, but the opium smoker can indulge in his luxury from, morning till night without any apparent injury. It is plain, therefore, that opium smoking and opium eating cannot be classed in the same category at all, but stand apart quite separately and distinctly.

I may here again appropriately refer to Sir Wilfrid Lawson’s speech at the Anti-Opium meeting at Newcastle. In the course of his remarks, the speaker referred with some humour to an Anti-Tobacco-smoking Society, a once active organization. At a meeting of this body held at Carlisle, it appears that the chief orator,—an energetic person, with wonderful powers of imagination and a fluent tongue, quite another Mr. Storrs Turner—having exhausted his power of vituperation in denouncing the Virginian weed and its terrible effects upon its votaries, alleged in particular that tobacco smoking tended to shorten human life, but here he was interrupted by one of the audience, a jovial middle-aged north countryman, who said, “I don’t know that Mr. Lecturer, for my father smoked till he was eighty!” “Ah!” exclaimed the other, quite equal, as he thought, to the occasion, “your father’s case was an exceptional one; he was an unusually strong, healthy man. Anyone who sees you, his hale, hearty son, must know that. Had he not been a tobacco smoker he would have lived much longer.” “I don’t know that either,” returned the countryman, “for he is alive and well and still smokes tobacco.” Now had Sir Wilfrid delivered that speech at a meeting formed to protest against the theories of the Anti-Tobacco Society, he would assuredly have scored; but, as matters stood, I must claim his speech as one made in favour of my views upon the opium question; for, to use a famous formula, I would say to the honourable baronet, “Would you be surprised to hear that I can produce to you, not only an aged father and son who are opium smokers, but a father, son, and grandson all living who follow that practice, and have done so all their lives without injury to health?”

But enjoyable as tobacco smoking may be, I contend that, to the Asiatic at least, opium smoking is not only a more agreeable but also a far more beneficial practice. Tobacco has no curative properties, but is simply a poison; opium is the most valuable medicine known; where all other sedatives fail its powers are prominent. As an anodyne no other medicine can equal it. There is one property peculiar to opium, that is that it is non-volatilizable, or nearly so. If a piece of opium is put on a red-hot plate, it will not volatilize; that is, it will not disappear in the form of vapour, which by chemical means can be preserved in order to resume or retain its original character. But it will be destroyed by combustion; the heat will consume it in the same manner as it would destroy a piece of sugar or any other non-volatilizable body; whereas a substance that is volatilizable, like sulphur, on being subjected to the same process, instead of being destroyed, is simply given out in vapour, and by proper means may be caught again and reformed in the shape of sulphur. So when you place opium into a pipe and put the pellet to the lamp, the effect of the combustion is to destroy the active property of the opium; the smoker takes the smoke thrown off into his mouth, which he expels either through the mouth or nostrils. The only way, therefore, he can get any of the active property of the opium into his system is by smoking it like tobacco. Now tobacco, on the contrary, is volatilizable, but the poison is so volatile, and escapes so freely through the bowl of the pipe in the shape of vapour, and is so rapidly expelled from the mouth, that no harm is produced by the process of smoking the deadly poison, the natural recuperative power of the frame neutralizing the effects of the noisome vapour. The difference between opium and tobacco smoking appears to be this:—In the one case you take into your mouth the mere smoke of a valuable aromatic drug, which, when passed into the stomach in proper quantities as a medicine, has powerful curative properties, the smoke when expelled leaving no substance behind it, but in its passage exerting a pleasant and perfectly harmless stimulating effect upon the nerves.

In the case of tobacco, the fumes with the volatilized substance of a foul and poisonous weed having no curative properties whatever, and having the most loathsome and offensive smell to those who have not gone through the pain and misery necessary to accustom themselves to them, is taken into the mouth. Nicotine, the alkaloid of tobacco, is simply a deadly and rapid poison, useful only to the assassin. Morphia, the alkaloid of opium, is only poisonous when taken in an excessive quantity; whether used internally or injected under the skin, it is the most wonderful anodyne and sedative known. I fully believe that, when medical men come to study opium and opium smoking more fully, it will become the established opinion of the faculty that opium smoking is not only perfectly harmless, but that it is most beneficial, so that it may ultimately not only put down spirit drinking, but perhaps supersede, to a great extent, tobacco. But few medical men in this country have as yet made opium a special study. They only know its use and properties as described in the British Pharmacopeia; many even of those who have practised in the parts of India where the drug is eaten do not, it seems, as yet fully understand all its properties. Dr. Ayres himself admits that he was astonished after his arrival in Hong Kong to find the great difference between the effects of smoking and eating the drug. I may here remind my readers that we have, or had once, an Anti-Tobacco-smoking Society, just as there is now an Anti-Opium-smoking Society. The former had so many living evidences of the absurdities alleged by its supporters against the use of tobacco, that the agitation was laughed down and has either died a natural death or has only a moribund and spasmodic existence; but had the place where the alleged enormity of tobacco smoking was practised been Africa, I think the Society would have died a much harder death, or at all events shown more vitality. The Anti-Opium Society would have shared the same fate long ago were it not that the scene of all the alleged evils is China, ten thousand miles away, and the witnesses against their absurd allegations live the same distance from us. But still, believe me, the Anti-Opium Society’s days are numbered: it is doomed, and, like the Anti-Tobacco craze, will be numbered soon amongst the things that were. I flatter myself that in the delivery and publication of these lectures I have given the agitation a heavy blow and great discouragement.

I had some time ago the advantage of reading a very interesting and remarkable letter in the “Times” by Sir George Birdwood, to whom I have already referred; he has had more than fourteen years’ experience in India as a medical man, and has made the opium question a special study. I think his testimony is worth a great deal more than that of any layman, however learned or talented; the one has both theoretical and practical knowledge of his subject, the other at best is only a theorist. Believe me, the Roman poet knew human nature well when he said, “Trust the man who has experience of facts.” The paper, which is a learned and interesting one, is too long to read, but here is an extract from it:—

My readers can judge for themselves from the authorities I have indicated; but the opinion I have come to from them and my own experience is, that opium is used in Asia in a similar way to alcohol in Europe, and that, considering the natural craving and popular inclination for, and the ecclesiastical toleration of it and its general beneficial effects, and the absence of any resulting evil, there is just as much justification for the habitual use of opium in moderation as for the moderate use of alcohol, and indeed far more.

Sir Benjamin Brodie is always quoted as the most distinguished professional opponent of the dietetical use of opium; but what are his words (Psychological Enquiries, p. 248):—“The effect of opium when taken into the stomach is not to stimulate, but to soothe the nervous system. It may be otherwise in some instances, but these are rare exceptions to the general rule. The opium eater is in a passive state, satisfied with his own dreamy condition while under the influence of the drug. He is useless but not mischievous. It is quite otherwise with alcoholic liquors.” Opium smoking, which is the Chinese form of using the drug—for which the Indian Government is specially held responsible—is, to say the least in its favour, an infinitely milder indulgence. As already mentioned, I hold it to be absolutely harmless. I do not place it simply in the same category with even tobacco smoking, for tobacco smoking may, in itself, if carried into excess, be injurious, particularly to young people under twenty-five; but I mean that opium smoking in itself is as harmless as smoking willow-bark or inhaling the smoke of a peat-fire or vapour of boiling water.... I have not seen Surgeon-General Moore’s recent paper on opium in the Indian Medical Gazette, but I gather from a notice of it quoted from the Calcutta Englishman, in the Homeward Mail of the 14th of November last, that it supplies a most exhaustive and able vindication of the perfect morality of the revenue derived by the Indian Government from the manufacture and sale of opium to the Chinese. He quotes from Dr. Ayres, of Hong Kong: “No China resident believes in the terrible frequency of the dull, sodden-witted, debilitated opium smoker met with in print;” and from Consul Lay:—“In China the spendthrift, the man of lewd habits, the drunkard, and a large assortment of bad characters, slide into the opium smoker; hence the drug seems chargeable with all the vices of the country.” Mr. Gregory, Her Majesty’s Consul at Swatow, says Dr. Moore never saw a single case of opium intoxication, though living for months and travelling for hundreds of miles among opium smokers. Dr. Moore directly confirms my own statement of the Chinese having been great drunkards of alcohol before they took to smoking opium. I find also a remarkable collection of folk-lore (Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, by Herbert A. Giles), evidence in almost every chapter of the universal drinking habits of the Chinese before the introduction of opium among them, notwithstanding that the use of alcohol is opposed to the cardinal precepts of Buddhism. What Dr. Moore says of the freedom of opium smokers from bronchial thoracic diseases is deserving of the deepest consideration. I find that, on the other hand, the Chinese converts to Christianity suffer greatly from consumption. The missionaries will not allow them to smoke, and, as they also forbid their marrying while young, after the wise custom, founded on an experience of thousands of years of their country, they fall into those depraved, filthy habits, of which consumption is everywhere the inexorable witness and scourge. When spitting of blood comes on, the opium pipe is its sole alleviation.

Now Dr. Birdwood is not only well informed upon the opium question, but is certainly one of the ablest opponents of the Anti-Opium agitation who has yet appeared. His letters in the “Times” created quite a sensation, and so alarmed Mr. Storrs Turner that he left no means untried to neutralize their effects. At this point a bright idea occurred to him. Finding that there was a general consensus of opinion against him amongst English medical men and other competent authorities that the outcry against opium was groundless, he hit upon the brilliant expedient of discrediting them all, by the assertion that Englishmen are so prejudiced that they are not to be believed. This is what he says on the subject in his famous article in the Nineteenth Century having in a previous passage imagined a case in which China was the plaintiff and Great Britain the defendant:—

The baneful effects of the opium vice are established by universal experience. One may apply to it the theological maxim Quod semper quod ubique, quod ab omnibus. Two considerations will show that the opposition of a few dissentient voices does not detract from the general conclusion. Most of these are quite clear on the point that opium is bad for everybody but Chinese. They would be horrified at the suggestion that opium should be freely used in England and approve the efforts or supposed efforts of the Indian Government to keep it out of the way of the natives of India. On another point these dissentients are all alike; every one of them is prejudiced in favour of the defendant in the case before us. They are all Englishmen. No French or German medical man, no single Chinese authority has been quoted to testify to the innocence of opium. Some of these apologists are opium merchants, who aver that the drug by which they make their wealth is a boon and a blessing to China; or it is a gentleman employed in the India Office who considers opium smoking as safe as “twiddling one’s thumbs.”

Could the force of folly or fanaticism go further than that? All Englishmen are prejudiced. I wonder, did it ever occur to Mr. Storrs Turner that he, being an Englishman, might be a little prejudiced also—on the other side of the question. Yes; Dr. Ayres, Dr. Eatwell, Surgeon-General Moore, Dr. Birdwood, and a host of other eminent medical men standing in the front rank of their profession, Sir Rutherford Alcock, Mr. Colborne Baber, Mr. W. Donald Spence, and others are not to be believed—because they are Englishmen! Were they Germans or Frenchmen, they would, of course, be entitled to the fullest credence. Like the priest and prophet of Crete, Mr. Storrs Turner holds that all his countrymen are liars.[8] But, stay, do I not remember that gentleman’s holding a select conference of English medical men, about October 1882, when certain resolutions were drawn up condemnatory of opium? Surely, yes. The invitations were issued by the Earl of Shaftesbury. I should like to ask Mr. Storrs Turner were the medical and other gentlemen then present Englishmen or foreigners? If I do not greatly err they were all Englishmen. Does Mr. Storrs Turner consider those gentlemen worthy of credit? I rather think he does: so that Mr. Turner’s creed runs thus: “Englishmen are to be believed so long as they agree with me on the opium question. When they differ from me on that subject they are not to be believed at all.” Mr. Turner is fond of treating his readers to theological maxims. I will now give him a legal one which, I think, is applicable to his case. It runs thus, translated into plain English: “He is not to be heard who alleges things contrary to each other.” Of course, the reader has seen that Mr. Turner’s sneer at “the gentleman employed in the India Office,” is at Sir George Birdwood, whose pungent articles in the Times have inflicted such damage on his cause, and whose efforts in the interests of common sense and truth he would wish to suppress.

As Mr. Turner’s tastes are exotic, I will furnish him now with some foreign testimony that may perhaps astonish him. For many years previous to 1858, Don Sinibaldo de Mas had been the Envoy-Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary of the Court of Spain at Pekin. That nobleman had travelled much in China, India, Java, Borneo, and Malacca, having learned the Chinese language the better to enable him to utilize his travels in those places. In 1858 he published a book[9] in the French language on China and the Chinese, making special reference to the opium question, to which he has devoted one very interesting chapter exclusively. The book was brought out in Paris, and has never, that I am aware of, been translated into English. Now about the last person from whom one would expect to obtain testimony of the kind is a Spaniard. Yet so it is. This book of Don Sinibaldo de Mas is, indeed, one of the most powerful vindications of British policy in India and China that has yet been written. I hardly think even Mr. Storrs Turner can accuse this gentleman of partiality, or object to his testimony as being influenced by personal motives. This is part of what he says on the subject:—

I may say, in the first instance, that personally neither as a private individual nor as a public functionary have I ever been in the slightest degree interested in this (opium) trade, for be it noted that Spanish vessels have never imported into China a single chest of opium. I consequently approach this subject with complete impartiality. I have known the Chinese at Calcutta, Singapore, Penang, Malacca, Manila, and in many parts of their own country, where I acquired a sufficient knowlege of the Chinese language to enable me to converse with the natives and make myself fully acquainted with the opium question, which I believe I understand, and may be considered thoroughly unbiassed in my opinions.

Opium has been preached against and denounced as a veritable poison, and it has been looked upon as a crime in those who have made the drug an object of commerce or gain. A memorial embodying those views, signed by many missionaries and supported by the Earl of Chichester, was presented to Queen Victoria. A meeting was also held in London, composed of philanthropic gentlemen, presided over by the Earl of Shaftesbury, when a petition to the Queen embodying the same object was drawn up; this document I shall refer to more particularly later on. Lastly, some members of the House of Lords and Commons spoke against the sale of opium. On the other hand, Christian merchants established in China, many men of eminence, such as Sir J. F. Davis and others of the highest respectability, have maintained that the smoking of this drug has less deletorious effects than the use of fermented liquors. I will endeavour to explain this question in all good faith and impartiality. In the maritime towns of India, Malacca, Java, the Philippines, Borneo, and Sooloo the Chinese are at liberty to smoke opium where and when they please, and can buy it cheaper than they can in Canton or Shanghai, not to mention the inland towns: yet it is a well-known fact that in all these countries, notwithstanding their unwholesome climates, the opium-smoking Chinese are remarkably healthy and strong. These very opium smokers are employed as farm labourers, masons, and porters, enduring great fatigue and performing the most arduous labours; they have acquired such an excellent reputation as colonists that efforts have been made during the last few years to induce them to settle in Lima and Cuba. The percentage of deaths amongst these people does not exceed the usual rate, and I must confess that having known numbers of Chinese emigrants in the various countries I have mentioned, I have never heard of a single death or of any serious illness having been caused by opium smoking.

It was only on my first arrival in China that I was made aware of the dire effects this narcotic is said to produce, and that the vapour inhaled by opium smokers was designated a poison; I must add that in none of the different parts of China which I have visited has it come to my knowledge that death has resulted from opium smoking. Having asked several natives whom I thought worthy of credence whether they had ever heard of a death having occurred from the habit, they answered me that it might have happened to a very inordinate smoker, but only in the event of his being suddenly deprived of the indulgence. One Chinaman related how he had witnessed such a case. He had known an inveterate opium smoker who had become extremely poor, and was found insensible and almost lifeless; some good-natured person passing by puffed some fumes of opium into his mouth, which immediately seemed to revive him, and enabled him shortly to smoke a pipe himself, which most effectually recalled him to life. I admit that opium is in itself a poison, but let me ask what changes does not fire produce in the various substances which it consumes?

I should like to know what does Mr. Storrs Turner think of that. Here is a highly-educated Spanish gentleman, speaking Chinese well, living amongst the natives, studying their habits, especially as regards their use of the opium pipe, declaring that the practice is innocuous. Now, supposing that instead of smoking opium these Chinese in Malacca, Java, Borneo, and the Philippines were addicted to the habitual use of spirits, wine, or even beer, instead of opium, can any intelligent being suppose for a moment that they would be the patient, strong, healthy, hard-working people that Don Sinibaldo De Mas found them, and which they still are?

Let us refer to Mr. W. Donald Spence’s testimony as to the effects of opium. I quote again from his Report of the trade of Ichang for 1881:—

As to the effect of this habit on the people, amongst whom it is so widespread, there is but one opinion. Baron Richthofen, the most experienced traveller who ever visited Szechuan, after noticing the extraordinary prevalence of the habit, says:—“In no other province except Hunan did I find the effects of the use of opium so little perceptible as in Szechuan.” Mr. Colborne Baber, who knows more of the province and its people than any living Englishman, says: Nowhere in China are the people so well off, or so hardy, and nowhere do they smoke so much opium. To these names of weight I add my own short experience. I found the people of Szechuan stout, able-bodied men, better housed, clad, and fed, and healthier looking than the Chinese of the Lower Yang-tsze. I did not see amongst them more emaciated faces and wasted forms than disease causes in all lands. People with slow wasting diseases such as consumption are, if they smoke opium, apt to be classed amongst the “ruined victims” of hasty observers, and amongst the cases of combined debility and opium smoking I saw, some were, by their own account, pseudo-victims of this type. There were some, too, whose health was completely sapped by smoking combined with other forms of sensual excess. And no doubt there were others weakened by excessive smoking simply, for excess in all things has its penalty. But the general health and well-being of the Szechuan community is remarkable; to their capacity for work and endurance of hardship, as well as to the material comforts of life they surround themselves with, all travellers bear enthusiastic testimony.

Now, allow me to ask the reader, can he suppose for a moment that if the people of Szechuan were prone to spirits, or even to beer drinking, in the same way as they are given to opium smoking, should we have the same results? Would those people be “so well off and so hardy,” so stout, able-bodied, and so much “better housed, clad, and fed, and healthier looking than the Chinese of the Lower Yang-tsze?” I think not. What, then, is the fair conclusion to draw from such a state of things? Why, only that opium smoking is a harmless if not a beneficial practice, unless when indulged in to an inordinate extent, which, it is now plain, is entirely exceptional. I think I am not far from the truth in saying that for one excessive opium smoker to be met with in China you will find in this country a hundred cases, at the least, of excessive indulgence in alcohol—the effects of this being incurable, whilst it is quite otherwise as regards excessive indulgence in opium. The inference, then, I think, is that so far as regards any evil effects from opium smoking, they are out of the range of practical politics and should be relegated to the region of sentiment alone.

I will now give you a passage from a valuable work by the learned Dr. J. L. W. Thudichum, Lecturer to St. George’s Hospital,[10] which will throw a good deal of light upon this part of my subject. At pp. 88 and 89 of the second volume he says:—

The medical uses of opium have been so well known through all historical times that it is a matter for surprise to find that they are not better appreciated in the present day. In this, as in many other matters, we are in fact only gradually emerging from the condition of those dark times during which, amongst many good things, the knowledge of opium, for example, was lost.... These and other considerations led me to look about for a more convenient mode of producing the effects of morphia without its inconveniences or even dangers. I know from the experiments of Descharmes and Benard (Compt. Rend., 40, 34) that in opium-smoking a portion of the morphia is volatilized and undecomposed, and I therefore experimentalized with the pyrolytic vapours of opium, first upon myself, then upon others; and when I had made myself fully acquainted with the Chinese method of using the drug, I came to the conviction that here one of the most interesting therapeutical problems had been solved in the most ingenious and at the same time in the most safe manner. I held in my hand a power well-known and used largely by Eastern races, yet its use neglected, ignored, denounced, and despised by the entire Western world.

In other and non-professional words, Dr. Thudichum has found opium smoking not only harmless but a valuable curative practice.

As to Chinese evidence on this question I could, had I thought proper, have adduced the testimony of some really trustworthy Chinese merchants and traders, which would have fully borne out all that I have stated as to the innocuous effects of opium smoking. I have refrained from doing so, because such evidence, however strong and reliable, would, I feel assured, be impugned as untrustworthy by the agents of the Anti-Opium Society and missionaries, who on their part would, no doubt, in the best faith and with good intentions, I admit, bring out counter testimony of so-called Christian converts and other natives of a wholly unreliable character. One of these persons, called Kwong Ki Chiu, styling himself “late a member of the Chinese Educational Commission in the United States,” has written, or purported to have written, from Hartford, in Connecticut, a letter on this question to the London and China Telegraph. The statements in this document are exaggerated, misleading, and, in many respects, actually untrue. I doubt very much if the letter was ever, in fact, written by a Chinaman at all, and suspect it was produced either here in London by some agent or advocate of the Anti-Opium Society and forwarded to Mr. Kwong Ki Chiu for signature, or that it was written by some American missionary. At any rate, it is plain that the writer has no real knowledge of the subject of his letter. To prove this is so it is only necessary to refer to one passage, in which the writer proceeds to show that opium is to a beginner more alluring than tobacco or spirits. He says:—

There is this also to be said as to the difference between the two stimulants: opium is much the more stimulating, and therefore more dangerous. It is also much more agreeable and fascinating. Not every person likes the taste of liquor; the flavour of tobacco is agreeable to very few persons at first: but everyone, of whatever nationality, finds the fragrance of the smoking opium agreeable and tempting, so that I have no doubt that if opium shops were opened in London as in China, the habit would soon become prevalent even among Englishmen.

Now this is not true. Every foreigner who has lived in China knows it to be quite the opposite. During my long residence in Hong Kong I have never known a single instance of an Englishman, or any other foreigner, being an opium smoker, although I have met with many who had smoked a few pipes by way of experiment. All have assured me that the vapour was nauseous, and produced no pleasurable sensations whatever. The fact that Europeans dislike the fumes of opium, and never indulge in the opium pipe, shows that Mr. Kwong Ki Chiu, who has doubtless been since his childhood under missionary tutelage, and therefore interdicted from the use of the drug, knows nothing reliable upon the subject he writes about so glibly. At a proper time and place, I should be prepared to treat Mr. Storrs Turner to such native testimony upon this subject as would make him open his eyes very wide and put him and his disciples to confusion and flight.

Let me now give you an extract from a despatch of Sir Henry Pottinger, formerly Her Majesty’s Governor-General and Minister Plenipotentiary in China, written by him some fifty years ago to the Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. It is very important, showing, as it does, the pains that have been taken by Her Majesty’s Government at home and her representatives in China so long ago to ascertain if there were any truth in the theory that opium smoking was injurious to the health and morals of the Chinese:—

I cannot admit in any manner the idea adopted by many persons that the introduction of opium into China is a source of unmitigated evil of every kind and a cause of misery. Personally, I have been unable to discover a single case of this kind, although, I admit that, when abused opium may become most hurtful. Besides, the same remark applies to every kind of enjoyment when carried to excess; but from personal observations, since my arrival in China, from information taken upon all points, and lastly, from what the Mandarins themselves say, I am convinced that the demoralization and ruin which some persons attribute to the use of opium, arise more likely from imperfect knowledge of the subject and exaggeration, and that not one-hundredth part of the evil arises in China from opium smoking, which one sees daily arising in England as well as in India from the use of ardent spirits so largely taken in excess in those countries.

I may now appropriately give you the promised extract from De Quincey’s Confessions. I recommend it to the notice of Sir Wilfrid Lawson. The distinction which he draws between alcoholic intoxication and the excitement produced by opium eating is instructive and entertaining. He says:—

Two of these tendencies I will mention as diagnostic, or characteristic and inseparable marks of ordinary alcoholic intoxication, but which no excess in the use of opium ever develops. One is the loss of self-command, in relation to all one’s acts and purposes, which steals gradually (though with varying degrees of speed) over all persons indiscriminately when indulging in wine or distilled liquors beyond a certain limit. The tongue and other organs become unmanageable: the intoxicated man speaks inarticulately; and, with regard to certain words, makes efforts ludicrously earnest yet oftentimes unavailing, to utter them. The eyes are bewildered, and see double; grasping too little, and too much. The hand aims awry. The legs stumble and lose their power of concurrent action. To this result all people tend, though by varying rates of acceleration. Secondly, as another characteristic, it may be noticed that, in alcoholic intoxication, the movement is always along a kind of arch; the drinker rises through continual ascents to a summit or apex, from which he descends through corresponding steps of declension. There is a crowning point in the movement upwards, which once attained cannot be renewed; and it is the blind, unconscious, but always unsuccessful effort of the obstinate drinker to restore this supreme altitude of enjoyment which tempts him into excesses that become dangerous. After reaching this acme of genial pleasure, it is a mere necessity of the case to sink through corresponding stages of collapse. Some people have maintained, in my hearing, that they had been drunk upon green tea; and a medical student in London, for whose knowledge in his profession I have reason to feel great respect, assured me, the other day, that a patient, in recovering from an illness, had got drunk on a beef-steak. All turns, in fact, upon a rigorous definition of intoxication.

Having dwelt so much on this first and leading error in respect to opium, I shall notice briefly a second and a third; which are, that the elevation of spirits produced by opium is necessarily followed by a proportionate depression, and that the natural and even immediate consequence of opium is torpor and stagnation, animal as well as mental. The first of these errors I shall content myself with simply denying; assuring my reader, that for ten years, during which I took opium, not regularly, but intermittingly, the day succeeding to that on which I allowed myself this luxury was always a day of unusually good spirits.

With respect to the torpor supposed to follow, or rather (if we were to credit the numerous pictures of Turkish opium-eaters) to accompany, the practice of opium-eating, I deny that also. Certainly, opium is classed under the head of narcotics, and some such effect it may produce in the end; but the primary effects of opium are always, and in the highest degree, to excite and stimulate the system. This first stage of its action always lasted with me, during my novitiate, for upwards of eight hours; so that it must be the fault of the opium-eater himself, if he does not so time his exhibition of the dose, as that the whole weight of its narcotic influence may descend upon his sleep.

First, then, it is not so much affirmed, as taken for granted, by all who ever mention opium, formally or incidentally, that it does or can produce intoxication. Now, reader, assure yourself, meo periculo, that no quantity of opium ever did, or could, intoxicate. As to the tincture of opium (commonly called laudanum), that might certainly intoxicate, if a man could bear to take enough of it; but why? Because it contains so much proof spirits of wine, and not because it contains so much opium. But crude opium, I affirm peremptorily, is incapable of producing any state of body at all resembling that which is produced by alcohol; and not in degree only incapable, but even in kind; it is not in the quantity of its effects merely, but in the quality, that it differs altogether. The pleasure given by wine is always rapidly mounting, and tending to a crisis, after which as rapidly it declines; that from opium, when once generated, is stationary for eight or ten hours: the first, to borrow a technical distinction from medicine, is a case of acute, the second of chronic, pleasure; the one is a flickering flame, the other a steady and equable glow. But the main distinction lies in this—that, whereas wine disorders the mental faculties, opium, on the contrary (if taken in a proper manner), introduces amongst them the most exquisite order, legislation, and harmony. Wine robs a man of his self-possession; opium sustains and reinforces it. Wine unsettles the judgment, and gives a preternatural brightness and a vivid exaltation to the contempts and the admirations, to the loves and the hatreds, of the drinker; opium, on the contrary, communicates serenity and equipoise to all the faculties, active or passive; and, with respect to the temper and moral feelings in general, it gives simply that sort of vital warmth which is approved by the judgment, and which would probably always accompany a bodily constitution of primeval or antediluvian health. Thus, for instance, opium, like wine, gives an expansion to the heart and the benevolent affections; but, then, with this remarkable difference, that in the sudden development of kind-heartedness which accompanies inebriation, there is always more or less of a maudlin and a transitory character, which exposes it to the contempt of the bystander. Men shake hands, swear eternal friendship, and shed tears—no mortal knows why; and the animal nature is clearly uppermost. But the expansion of the benigner feelings incident to opium is no febrile access, no fugitive paroxysm; it is a healthy restoration to that state which the mind would naturally recover upon the removal of any deep-seated irritation from pain that had disturbed and quarrelled with the impulses of a heart originally just and good. True it is, that even wine, up to a certain point, and with certain men, rather tends to exalt and to steady the intellect; I myself, who have never been a great wine-drinker, used to find that half-a-dozen glasses of wine advantageously affected the faculties, brightened and intensified the consciousness, and gave to the mind a feeling of being “ponderibus librata suis,” and certainly it is most absurdly said, in popular language, of any man, that he is disguised in liquor; for, on the contrary, most men are disguised by sobriety, and exceedingly disguised; and it is when they are drinking that men display themselves in their true complexion of character; which surely is not disguising themselves. But still, wine constantly leads a man to the brink of absurdity and extravagance; and, beyond a certain point, it is sure to volatilise and to disperse the intellectual energies; whereas opium always seems to compose what had been agitated and to concentrate what had been distracted. In short, to sum up all in one word, a man who is inebriated, or tending to inebriation, is, and feels that he is, in a condition which calls up into supremacy the merely human, too often the brutal, part of his nature; but the opium-eater (I speak of him simply as such, and assume that he is in a normal state of health) feels that the diviner part of his nature is paramount—that is, the moral affections are in a state of cloudless serenity; and high over all the great light of the majestic intellect.

This is the doctrine of the true church on the subject of opium, of which church I acknowledge myself to be the Pope (consequently infallible), and self-appointed legate à latere to all degrees of latitude and longitude. But then it is to be recollected that I speak from the ground of a large and profound personal experience, whereas most of the unscientific authors who have at all treated of opium, and even of those who have written professionally on the materia medica, make it evident, by the horror they express of it, that their experimental knowledge of its action is none at all.

I have now dealt with fallacies 1, 2, 3, and 5. The fourth Mr. Turner gravely states in his book—and I am perfectly sure it is accepted as seriously by his fellowers, that the supply of opium regulates the demand, and not the demand the supply. He says at pp. 152, 153:—

Defenders of the [opium] policy vainly strive to shelter it behind the ordinary operation of the trade laws of demand and supply. The operation of these economic laws does not divest of responsibility those who set them in motion at either end; for though it would be absurd to speak of supply as alone creative of demand, there is no question but that an abundant and constantly sustained supply increases demand whenever the article is not one of absolute necessity. When silk came by caravans across Central Asia, and a single robe was worth its weight in gold in Europe, the shining fabric was reserved for emperors and nobles, and no demand could be said to exist for it among common people, whereas now the abundant supply creates a demand among all classes but the very poorest. The maid-servant who covets a silk dress may be literally said to have had the demand created in her case, by the ample supply of the material which places it constantly before her eyes and renders it impossible for her to obtain it. Only a few years ago there was no demand for newspapers amongst multitudes who are now daily or weekly purchasers of them. In this case the supply of penny and halfpenny journals may be fairly said to have almost alone created the demand. Such illustrations might be indefinitely multiplied.

After that it may be said that the Birmingham jewellers and Manchester merchants have only to send out to China any amount they please of their wares, and they will find a ready market, the more the merrier. All their goods will be taken off their hands; they will only have to take care that the prices shall not be too exorbitant, for otherwise, as in the case of the maid-servant, though the Chinese working classes may have helped to create the demand, they would be unable to avail themselves of the supply. If that doctrine were sound, a mercantile firm could create as extensive a trade as it desired, and that, too, in any part of the world. Instead of sending out fifty thousand pounds worth this year, as it did last, it would have only to export ten times the amount, and still the demand would continue. The fact is, as every man well knows who is not blinded by enthusiasm and looks at the subject by the light of cool reason and common sense, that the effect of sending to China or elsewhere an excessive quantity of merchandise, even though such merchandise were in request there, would have the effect of glutting the market. It is only where the demand exists, and the desire to possess the article, or where the people want a particular class of thing, that the goods can be readily and profitably disposed of. I am sure that if we sent double the quantity of opium that we do to China, or, indeed, three times the amount, it would be readily bought up by the natives, because there is a great demand there for Indian opium, owing to its superior strength and better flavour. And it must be remembered that China is a vast empire, and that the natives cannot get as much of the Indian drug as they want. I had an opportunity recently of speaking to a German gentleman established here in London, who has been many years in the opium trade generally, who has made opium quite a study, tasting and smelling it, as wine merchants do their wine, and he declares that Indian opium has a perfume and aroma that is not found in the Chinese or Persian drug, and that, in fact, the smell of the one is comparatively agreeable, while that of the others is offensive. This, I believe, is one of the reasons for the Chinese liking Indian opium. For my own part I must say, that much as I dislike the odour of tobacco, I have a greater aversion still to the effluvium of opium in any form or shape, and I think this is also the case with all Europeans. In fact, opium smoking is a practice peculiar to China.

Nothing proves this so completely as the correspondence between Sir Robert Hart and his various Sub-Commissioners of Customs, as set out in the Yellow-Book to which I have so often referred. These Commissioners say that the Indian drug is almost invariably used to mix with the Chinese article to flavour and make it, so to speak, the more palatable. The proposition which Mr. Storrs Turner lays down is simply preposterous, and cannot for a moment be sustained. I do not wish to utter an offensive word towards that gentleman personally, whose talents and energy are unquestionable, and whom I hold in great esteem. Upon any subject but opium he would be incapable of writing anything but sound sense, but having opium on the brain, he starts theories that are wholly unsustainable, which, I am sorry to say, his devoted followers accept as gospel. But to return to the theory that supply creates the demand. By way of illustration, Mr. Turner goes on to show that, previous to the removal of the duty on newspapers, there were very few in the country, but that the moment the duty was taken off, they multiplied, which he considers proof that in this case the supply created the demand. That is most fallacious. The demand for newspapers always existed, but, unfortunately, owing to the oppressive taxes upon knowledge to which the press in former times was subjected, the supply was limited. In those days even a weekly newspaper was a great undertaking. An enterprising man in a country town might start such a paper, but after a lingering existence it was almost sure to die, not for want of readers, but because it was so heavily taxed that readers could not afford to buy it, the price then being necessarily high. First there was a penny duty on each copy of the newspaper. Next there was a duty of so much the pound upon the raw material, which had to be paid before it left the mill; and then there was a further duty upon every advertisement; so that the unfortunate newspaper proprietor was met with exactions on every side. A copy, even though an old one, of the Times, or of any of the London morning papers, was in former days eagerly sought for. In his “Deserted Village,” Goldsmith, describing the village ale-house, says:—

And one can imagine an eager group in that ale-house trying to get a glimpse of a London newspaper over the shoulders of the privileged holder. But when these oppressive duties were removed, a different state of things prevailed. The cost of starting and manufacturing a newspaper was reduced to about one-fifth of what it was formerly. Every considerable town had its daily and its weekly newspaper, because the demand had always existed, whilst, owing to these prohibitive taxes, there was no supply. The craving for news had always been present, and the moment these prohibitive duties were struck off, the ambitious editor, or proprietor, saw his opportunity and started a paper, not because the supply would create a demand, but because he knew the demand already existed, and he printed just as many as he thought he would find readers for, and no more. Had he printed more than was required the excess would have lain on his hands as so much waste paper. But according to Mr. Turner’s theory, the more newspapers he printed the more he would have sold! It will at once be recognised that this theory of supply and demand is simply absurd. If it could be shown to hold water for a moment, China, and other countries also, would be inundated with articles that never were seen there before. There would be no reason why China should not be largely supplied with ladies’ bonnets and satin shoes, which, we know, might lie there for a thousand years and never be used. I have brought before you this notable theory of Mr. Storrs Turner’s, to show you the utterly worthless kind of arguments with which the British public have been supplied, in order to support the silly, unfounded, and most mischievous agitation against the Indo-China opium trade.

The next fallacy is number six, namely: that all, or nearly all, who smoke opium are either inordinate smokers or necessarily in the way of becoming so; and that once the custom has been commenced it cannot be dropped, and that the consumption daily increases. That is not so at all. It is altogether exceptional to find an inordinate opium smoker; my reasons for saying so I have already given. I am supported in those views by every English resident in China, amongst them by Dr. Ayres, whose authority is simply unquestionable, and whose opinion on the point I have set out at page 7. I have known hundreds of men who were in the daily habit of smoking opium after business hours, and they never showed any decadence whatever. Opium smoking is never practised during business hours, except by very aged people or the criminal classes. This is an absolute fact. The Chinese are too wise and thrifty to while away their time in such luxurious practices during working hours. The opium pipe, as a rule, is indulged in more moderately than wine or cigars are with us, the Chinese being so extremely abstemious in their habits. I never saw any such instances of over-indulgence as Mr. Turner alleges, and I could get hundreds of European witnesses out in China and here in London who would depose to the same fact. Frequently have I compared the small shop-keeping and working people of China with the same classes here at home as regards sobriety, industry, and frugality, and always, I regret to say, in favour of the Chinese.

It is absolutely untrue, as put forward by the Anti-Opium Society and their secretary, Mr. Turner, that opium is so fascinating that, once a man begins to use it, he cannot leave it off; natives will smoke it, on and off, for two or three days, and not smoke it again for a week or more; but the truth is, the habit is a pleasant and beneficial one, and few who can afford it desire to discontinue smoking. The fact undoubtedly is, that if opium smoking were productive of the terrible results that the missionaries and the Anti-Opium Society allege, China would not be the densely-populated country that it now actually is. China could not have held its own as it has done so long and so successfully had all the people been addicted to such a vice as dram drinking. The true way to look at this aspect of the case is to suppose for a moment that, instead of being “opium sots,” as Mr. Storrs Turner puts it, the Chinese, “everywhere in China, in all climates and all soils, in every variety of condition and circumstance throughout the vast Empire,” to adopt that gentleman’s own language, drank spirits freely. Should we then have the Chinese the hard-working, industrious, thrifty, frugal people that we find them? I trow not. Intemperance carries with it the destruction of its votaries, but no baneful consequences attend opium smoking. Some thirty years ago, as Sir Rutherford Alcock tells us, an American missionary declared that there were twenty millions of opium smokers in China—all, no doubt, induced to that immorality by the British Government and people—and that two millions were dying annually from the effects of the vice! This monstrous tale was implicitly believed in by Lords Shaftesbury and Chichester. Yet we now have a Chinese official, Sir Robert Hart, deliberately telling the Government of China, in his official Yellow Book, that there are but two millions of smokers in the whole Empire; that Indian opium supplies but a moderate quantity of the drug to but half of that number; and that neither the health, wealth, nor prosperity of the people suffers in consequence.

This is what Don Sinibaldo de Mas says upon the subject:—

The most extraordinary of the advocates of the opium trade is the Earl of Shaftesbury, President of the Committee organized in London for the suppression of the traffic. I have not the slightest doubt as to the bona fides and excellent heart of the noble lord. There is something grand and generous in entering the lists for the welfare and protection of a distant and foreign nation, and manfully fighting for it against the interests of one’s own country and one’s native land. I sincerely admire men of such mettle and the country which can produce them, but I regret that Lord Shaftesbury did not act with greater caution, and that before entering upon this question he had not studied it more carefully; especially do I regret that he did not adopt a more moderate and dignified tone in the expression of his opinions. Had he done so, he would have saved himself from the reproach of having lent his name and sanction to a document disfigured by statistical errors, some of which are opposed to common sense, and also of having given gratuitous and undeserved insults to others who differed from his opinions.

He argues in his statement to the Queen’s Government that opium smoking annually kills two millions of people in China. How is it possible that the noble Earl could for a moment imagine that every year so many human beings voluntarily commit suicide! Two millions of adults who destroy themselves to enjoy a pleasure! Does it not strike His Lordship how absurd is such an antithesis as pleasure and death? Can he believe that human nature in China is different to what it is in Europe? Is it logical to give publicity to such strange assertions without adducing the slightest proofs. If we inquire into the accusations brought forward against the merchants and growers of opium, we find the same discrepancy and the same injustice. It is a mistake to imagine that the English alone trade in opium, for all foreigners alike, especially the Americans, introduce and sell it.

Lord Shaftesbury, in speaking of the value of the opium imported into China, says that the merchants “rob” the Chinese. I scarcely know which is the funnier, the idea expressed by the noble Earl, or the way in which he expresses it. I can assure His Lordship that amongst the merchants who make opium their business there are men of the highest integrity, perfect and most accomplished gentlemen, who not only are incapable of “stealing” anything, but who are equal to any living men in noble sentiments, justice, and practical benevolence; I need only mention one man, and do so because he is not now living. I refer to the late Mr. Launcelot Dent, who, during a most trying and critical time when this question first arose, was considered one of the most interested men in the opium trade.... Everyone who has been in China knows the generosity and the charity for which Mr. Launcelot Dent was renowned. Having on one occasion travelled from India to Europe with him, I saw many of his good deeds, but will only mention one, so as not to wander too far from my subject. A Catholic missionary was amongst the steerage passengers; Mr. Dent having seen this, without saying a word to any person on the subject, took a berth for him in the first cabin and paid the difference, begging me to ask him to take possession. The missionary expressed much gratitude, but said that as he had not a sufficient change of linen he would not feel at home in the state room, especially as there were lady passengers. Mr. Dent understood the difficulty, and having casually heard that the clergymen intended to proceed to Jerusalem, begged of him to accept the sum which the saloon cabin would have cost,[11] which the poor missionary accepted with heartfelt thanks.