Page:The opium revenue.djvu/16

 43. The effect on local consumption and excise must also be considered. With stringent regulations to check smuggling, and an effective system of cultivation under license, local consumption ought not to be stimulated more than under the present system, nor the excise duty materially affected. But on this, as on all other heads, the experience of Bombay would be required.

44. I submit, then, to the President and my honourable colleagues, that the Commission so strongly pressed for by Sir Charles Trevelyan, when in 1864 in charge of the Financial Department, should no longer be denied. Surely a case has been made out to justify at the least inquiry. Primâ facie, the change proposed would remove a blemish from the Administration without imperilling the finances. That cannot be an edifying position for the Government to occupy, in which it has year by year to determine the quantity of opium which it will bring to sale, in which there is a constant inducement for it to trim the market, and in which its haste to secure wider harvests and larger returns has repeatedly recoiled upon the trade, stimulated baneful speculation and gambling in Central and Western India, and ended in much misery. I do not speak of the undignified aspect of the British Government growing, manufacturing, and selling the drug,—performing in fact all the functions of producer and speculator. I will merely ask what the impression is upon the mind when we see Holkar performing the functions of opium trader, which are now discharged by the Government of Bengal.

45. The change would relieve the British Government from the odious imputation of pandering to the vice of China by over-stimulating production, over-stocking the market, and flooding China with the drug, in order to raise a wider and more secure revenue to itself,—an imputation of which, at least on one occasion, I fear that we are not wholly guiltless. A few years ago, when the Government of Bengal was straining every nerve to extend the cultivation of the poppy, I was witness to the discontent of the agricultural population in certain districts west of the Jumna from which the crop was for the first time being raised. Where the system of advances has long been in vogue, and the mode of preparing the drug well understood, no doubt the poppy is a popular crop; though even there the system of Government monopoly gives to Government officers a power of interference over those who have once taken their advances, which must be liable to abuse. But the case to which I allude was that of new districts where the poppy had not hitherto been grown, and into which the Bengal Board were endeavouring to extend the cultivation by the bait of large advances among an unwilling peasantry, and at the risk of inoculating them with a taste for a deleterious drug, and all this with the sole view of securing a wider area of poppy cultivation, and thus a firmer grasp of the China market. Witnessing this when on circuit in 1864, the impropriety of the position was to my mind so painful that, as the Governor General may perhaps recollect, I ventured at the time to address His Excellency directly on the subject.