Page:George Archdall Reid 1896 The present evolution of man.djvu/377

Rh He also quoted the following from a letter written in 1892 by Dr. A. T. Rose, an American missionary—

"You must not write our mission indifferent to the opium question; it has been connected with it from the days of Judson and Wade. Thirty years ago I was appointed to write a report on the introduction, increase, and effects of opium in Burmah by the 'British Burmah Missionary Convention.' The elder Hough, Wade, Bennett, and Kincaird were then living on the field. They all affirmed that there was no opium in Burmah before the English came. We laboured with Sir Arthur Phayre, who professed to believe that the Government must introduce opium in order to control and regulate it, otherwise the country would be flooded with it. As a revenue measure, the introduction of opium is an enormous blunder, for it blasts the vital sources of the revenue, it converts honest labourers into idle thieves and vagabonds. If all the cultivators in Burmah were to take to growing opium, in five years there would not be a basket of rice. I have never known a Burman or Karen to use it who did not go to the bad sharp."—Ibid. p. 26.

Sir John Strachy said—

"The only country—I cannot say of India, because it is not India, it is as unlike India as Algeria is unlike France—but the only country under Indian administration in regard to which it appears to me that any evidence has been produced that deserves serious consideration, to show that any considerable section of the people has suffered from the consumption of opium, is Burmah. Now it is indisputable that there has been a great body of opinion as to the injurious effect of opium on the Burmese. Two chief Commissioners, Sir Charles Aitchison and Sir Alexander Mackenzie, both of them men who are entitled to speak on the subject with the highest authority, have concurred in that opinion, and there is no doubt that the