governor of Canton as an equal; while, on
the other hand, he was commanded to check,
with all the British power he might possess,
the arrival of British opium ships from India.
Throughout the greater part of the years
eighteen hundred and thirty-four, five, six,
seven, and eight, the superintendent was in
constant hot water on these matters; Lord
Napier and Sir J. F. Davis successively tried
to conciliate the authorities, but failed; and
it fell to the lot of Captain Elliott to be
superintendent of trade at the time of Lin's coup
d'état. Elliott advised the merchants to give
up the opium. This was done; more than
twenty thousand chests were delivered up.
Lin and his imperial master were at least
sincere in this matter, for the opium, instead
of being made profitable to official pockets,
was all destroyed in the presence of the
foreign merchants and agents, at the rate of
three hundred chests per day. The opium
was converted into a kind of brown, fetid
mud by the agency of salt, lime, and water,
and was then sluiced into the river. Elliott
gave receipts or notes to the merchants,
promising indemnity for the loss of their opium.
During the remainder of the year, frequent
quarrels and scuffles took place between the
Chinese authorities and the foreigners at
Macao and Hong Kong. When all these
things were known in England, the sword
was determined on, and the opium war
commenced. This war, the details of which may
be sufficiently in the reader's recollection,
lasted nearly three years, and was terminated
by the Treaty of Nankin, in August, eighteen
hundred and forty-two.

Let the opium war pass in all its political
and military relations; let us say nothing
about Lin, Keshen, Kwan, and Ke-quy, on
the Chinese side, or about Elliott, Maitland,
Bremer, Gough, Parker, and Pottinger, on
the English side; let us pass over the
disputes between the English government and
the merchants concerning the proper price to
be paid for the opium destroyed; let us
admit that the Chinese carried on war in a
barbarous and outrageous way; but, at the
same time, let us remark how great was the
tendency of the Chinese government throughout
the whole affair to point to the opium
trade as a source of evil. They asked at the
outset of the war, during the war, and at the
end of the war, that the English government
would assist in putting down this contraband
trade. The treaty justified the expectation,
that this, at least in intention, would be done.
A proclamation from the superintendent,
issued some months after the signing of the
treaty, formally disapproved of the clandestine
opium trade. Again, the superintendent
issued another proclamation soon
afterwards, addressed chiefly to English
merchants and traders at Hong Kong, Canton,
Amoy, Foo-choo-foo, Ningpo, and Shang-hae,
in which he said: "It having been brought
to my notice that such a step has been
contemplated as sending vessels with opium on
board into the ports of China opened by
treaty to foreign trade, and demanding that
the opium shall be admitted to importation
by virtue of the concluding clause of the
new tariff, I think it expedient by this
proclamation to point out to all whom it may
concern, that opium being an article the traffic
in which is well known to be declared illegal
and contraband by the laws and imperial
edicts of China, any person who will take
such a step will do so at his own risk, and
will, if a British subject, meet with no
support or protection from Her Majesty's consuls
or other officers."

Without any reference to wars present,
past, or future, or to the ins and outs of
statesmen, or to the disruption of ministries
and parliaments, we may present the
arguments on both sides of the opium question,
in the following condensed form:

The denouncer of opium addresses the
British nation thus: You entice the Chinese
to ruin their fortune and health, that you
may make money. You condemn the
Americans for encouraging and extending
slavery; and yet you wink at a traffic quite as
iniquitous, for a reason quite as selfish. You
adduce drunkenness as a parallel evil in our
own country; but opium holds its victim by
a tighter grasp than does any kind of drink.
If you will not attend to English objections,
at least give ear to a distinguished man in
China, who, speaking of the corroding
influence of the drug, says, "It is not man that
eats the opium, but opium that eats the
man." If you think Christian missions to
China good, look around you; for reasonable
men among the Chinese laugh with bitter
scorn when you bring the Bible in one hand
and opium in the other. You should
remember that opium-smoking is not an ancient
habit in China; it is comparatively modern,
and therefore more easily eradicated. You
should regard it as cruel to tempt the
Chinese with this mind-destroyer just now,
when they are distracted with insurrections
and civil wars. You should give the Chinese
government credit for sincerity in their
abhorrence of opium as a national evil; since
they have submitted to costly compromises
of fiscal interests, and have severely punished
their own servants detected in prosecuting
the trade: they might obtain an enormous
revenue by legalising the import of opium at
a duty, or might benefit their country by
cultivating opium at home, at one-fifth of the
present cost price; but they refuse to pander to
immorality for the sake of profit. You should
consider that China pays us twenty million
dollars' worth of silver annually, besides the
tea and silk and other articles sold, to pay
for the opium; that this drain of silver
impoverishes the country; that the sale of
British manufactures to the Chinese is not so
large as had been hoped and expected; and
that if the trade in opium were discouraged