Page:American Diplomacy in the Orient - Foster (1903).djvu/89

 result of the victory of Clive at Plassy, the British East India Company secured the exclusive privilege of opium cultivation, and it soon became its most important article of exportation. Three years after the East India Company obtained this monopoly, its importation to China had increased five fold, and in 1790 it had mounted up to 4000 chests, or twenty fold.

By that time it was fast coming into popular use for self-indulgence as a narcotic, and its evil effects were so apparent in the vicinity of Canton that the governor of the province memorialized the emperor for its exclusion. He stated that it was "a subject of deep regret that the vile dirt of foreign countries should be received in exchange for the commodities and money of the empire, … and that the practice of smoking opium should spread among the people of the inner land, to the waste of their time and destruction of their property." In response to this memorial the emperor issued an edict in 1796 prohibiting its importation, and thenceforward the imperial authorities sought to suppress the traffic. The governor of Canton, in making proclamation to the foreign traders of this prohibition, told them that the Celestial Empire did not presume to forbid the people of the West to use opium and extend the habit in their dominions; "but," he said, "that opium should flow into this country where vagabonds clandestinely purchase and eat it, and continually become sunk in the_ most stupid and besotted state, so as to cut down the powers of nature and destroy life, is an injury to the minds and manners of men of the greatest magnitude;