Page:The opium revenue.djvu/22

 Bengal opium now in the market, and mean to be so next year also? There is no natural necessity that 50,000 chests of opium should be produced next year, and that the Government should get £5,000,000 by the sale of them. The land will not grow poppy unless the ryots sow seed; the ryots will not sow seed unless the Government advance the money. Hence, Sir J. P. Grant's argument is convicted of the fallacy of treating a set of circumstances as necessary in themselves, which are in truth the artificial result of human agency; and his plea that the Government of India is exempt from responsibility as to the effects of opium is unsound. Were the trade from first to last in the hands of private capitalists, they would be responsible for producing opium; and if opium is, as is alleged, a deadly evil, they would justly be exposed to the odium of producing a deadly evil for the sake of gain. All that odium which they would incur, the Government is actually incurring. The Government, therefore, cannot shift the onus of proving that opium is injurious upon the opponents of the monopoly. It is bound to satisfy itself that the serious charges brought against opium, which are supported by so vast a body of evidence, are untrue. It is bound to satisfy itself that on the whole the effect of opium is a blessing, or at least not an injury to mankind. Mere neglect to make this inquiry is moral guilt.

Let us now proceed to show the grave practical difference between simply raising revenue by taxation, and the raising of revenue by holding and carrying on the monopoly of a trade.

1. The producer and merchant are naturally interested to promote the increase of the trade.

If the export of Bengal opium had been 50,000 chests annually from time immemorial, and were fixed of necessity at that amount to the end of time, Sir J. P. Grant's reasoning would be less open to objection. But in 1831-32 it was only 7500 chests, in 1851-52 it was 32,000 chests, and in 1871-72 it was over 49,000 chests. Who is responsible for this increase? True, if the Government only raised revenue by taxation, it would have had an indirect interest in the increase of the trade. But how much less compromising to its character that would have been than to be chargeable with having directly promoted by all the means in its power, not only the growth but the sale of a drug which the Chinese Board for Foreign Affairs describes as "a deadly poison most injurious to mankind," and the effect of which our own ambassador at Peking describes as "many times more pernicious than the gin and whiskey drinking which we deplore at home"! Through a series of years our Indian