Page:A wandering student in the Far East vol.1 - Zetland.djvu/265

Rh to supply the demand for the drug which they found in China from the prolific poppy-fields of India. Opium in India is at the present day a Government monopoly, and India sends to China 50,000 piculs of opium a-year; let it, then, be asserted as emphatically as it can be, that the Government of India is in duty bound to take such steps in the regulation of her opium traffic as are, in the opinion of competent authorities, best calculated to have the maximum effect in bringing to an end the vicious habit among the Chinese people. This appears to me to be axiomatic, whether the question be looked at from a moral point of view, or from the less altruistic point of view of the expediency of giving some outward and visible sign of our declared policy of cementing the ties of friendship between the Governments and peoples of the two countries; and that public opinion in Great Britain is alive to its responsibilities is clear from the resolution passed unanimously by the House of Commons on May 30th, 1906, affirming its conviction that the Indo-Chinese opium trade is morally