14
`Britain's Opium Harvest' The Anti-Opium Movement
The
`opium wars' of the middle of the century have long been a familiar
part of considerations of nineteenth-century opium use. But the most
important Far Eastern influence on English opium use came not at this
time, but in the last quarter of the century. The foundation of a fully
fledged anti-opium movement in the 1870s opposing Britain's
participation in the opium trade with China had its effect on
perceptions of domestic opium use even though its primary focus was a
Far Eastern and not an English _one., The racial feeling aroused in
anti-opium propaganda also found expression in the establishment of
beliefs (largely erroneous) about opium smoking and opium `dens' in the
East End of London. It is with the shaping of attitudes towards
domestic opium use by Far Eastern experience at the end of the century
that Chapters 14 and 15 will deal.
The `opium wars' and English opium use
Nevertheless,
the domestic impact of the mid-century wars should at least be
mentioned. For they initiated, at least in embryo, the connection
between hostile reactions to opium use in the East and changed
perceptions of opium in England. The opium wars were a development of a
trading policy which received support from both the British and the
Indian governments. The East India Company's monopoly of trade with
China had ended in 1834. The Company maintained a virtual monopoly of
the cultivation and sale of opium in India, but distribution of the
drug in China was left in private hands. It had in this way perfected
`the technique of growing opium in India and disowning it in China'. It
was the amount of opium entering China, the emperor's decision to make
a strong stand, and British demands for free trade and diplomatic
equality which led to the opium war of 1839-42, concluded by the Treaty
of Nanking. A second opium war between 1856 and 1858 came to an end
with the Treaty of Tientsin.1 The two wars were prime examples of
commercial imperialism, not only through the opening of the treaty
ports but through British control of the Chinese customs which the 1842
Treaty established, and the continuing import of opium without
restraint. They also saw the beginnings of an organized anti-opium
agitation. Much early antiopium feeling expressed itself in
parliamentary terms. The debate on the war in 1840 led to condemnations
of this `pernicious article', opium; Gladstone was moved to an eloquent
condemnation of the immorality of the trade.2 But even the
parliamentary opposition to opium was limited. A motion opposing the
continuance of the trade and introduced by Lord Ashley in April 1843
was withdrawn when Sir Robert Peel assured him it would impede the
negotiations in progress between the British and Chinese governments,
and opposition did not revive until the time of the second opium war.3
Ashley (now Lord Shaftesbury) presented a memorial on the subject to
the Foreign Secretary in 1855. In 1857, he introduced the opium
question in the House of Lords by asking for a judicial opinion on
whether or not the trade was legal.4
In several ways the reactions
and associations evoked by the wars were portents of the more developed
anti-opium movement at the end of the century. It was at this time -
when imports of opium into China were necessarily interrupted - that
comment was made about the apparent increase in opium being brought
into England and the consequent dangers of increased use of the drug,
in particular among the working class. At the same time, too, the link
between moral opposition to opium in the Far East and the medical
ideology of opium use at home was forged. The longevity debate of the
middle of the century owed much to Far
Eastern evidence. Surgeon
Little, who had attacked Sir Robert Christison's conclusions in the
Monthly Journal of Medical Science in 1850, dealt exclusively with his
experience of opium eating and smoking in Singapore; others who
contributed to the longevity argument also deployed evidence of the
effects of the drug taken from the East.5 The disbelief in moderation
and longevity and the division between legitimate medical and other
non-medical use of the drug were already in the process of
establishment.
Medical men involved in the English debate were also
committed to the agitation against the Far Eastern trade. In 1843,
Shaftesbury used the evidence of British medical men involved in the
longevity debate to support his cause. Sir Benjamin Brodie, the noted
surgeon, and twenty-four other medical men, including Sir Henry
Halford, President of the Royal College of Physicians, and Anthony
White, President of the Royal College of Surgeons, were of the opinion
that:
However valuable opium may be when employed as an article
of medicine, it is impossible for any one who is acquainted with the
subject to doubt that the habitual use of it is productive of the most
pernicious consequences - destroying the healthy action of the
digestive organs, weakening the powers of the mind, as well as those of
the body, and rendering the individual who indulges himself in it a
worse than useless member of society.6
The anti-opium trade
movement was at this stage in its infancy, but moral opposition and
medical justification for such views were already closely allied.
The
anti-opium organizations in existence in England at the time of the
opium wars were short-lived and without much public impact.
An'Anti-Opium Society' was responsible for the publication in 1840 of
W. S. Fry's Facts and Evidence Relating to the Opium Trade with China.
It was as chairman of a `committee formed to sever all connections of
the English people and its Government with the opium trade' that
Shaftesbury presented the 1855 memorial.' The Society of Friends was
turning its attention towards the contraband traffic in opium. Quakers
were particularly prominent in the anti-opium movement of the late
nineteenth _century; as early as 1858 the Society appealed to Lord
Derby, then Prime Minister, against legalization of the trade.8 But the
Treaty of Tientsin (1858) did establish its legality. The ground was
cut away from under the movement's feet. An Edinburgh Committee for the
Suppression of the Indo-Chinese Opium Traffic formed in 1859 received
scant attention.' For all intents and purposes, the anti-opium question
was in abeyance for the next decade.
The anti-opium movement 1874-1900
The
question revived with vigour in the 1 870s. In 1874, what was to be the
main anti-opium organization, the Anglo-Oriental Society for the
Suppression of the Opium Trade (the 'AngloOriental' was later dropped),
was founded. The Society owed its origin to the efforts of a group of
Quaker anti-opium campaigners in Birmingham and to the unwavering
support of the Pease family of Darlington, who were also Quakers. An
anti-opium committee was originally formed in Birmingham in 1874 as the
outcome of two public meetings held to protest against the trade.
Edward Pease was a member of the Birmingham committee and it was he who
suggested a competition whereby prizes were offered for essays on
British Opium Policy and its Results to India and China. Storrs Turner,
the ex-missionary who was to be the first secretary of the Society for
the Suppression of the Opium Trade, was one of the prizewinners and his
book was published under the same title in 1876. The Society
transferred its offices to London - to King Street, Westminster,
conveniently near both the Houses of Parliament and the India Office.
In November 1874, the AngloOriental Society was established as a
national instead of a purely local organization.10
The early aims of
the Society were in many ways a continuation of those of the
mid-century organizations. Opium smuggling was no longer an issue since
the Treaty of Tientsin. The main demands were now the abolition of the
government monopoly of opium in India and the withdrawal of unfair
pressure on the Chinese government to admit Indian opium. In these
early days of its existence the Society's position was definitely a
non-absolute one, and any emphasis on the distinction between medical
and non-medical usage was notably absent." The founder members and
driving force behind the Society in its early years were almost without
exception Quakers. Only Storrs Turner was not. Without the financial
backing provided by the Pease banking family in particular the Society
would never have remained in existence. But the Society broadened its
support considerably during its early years. Lord Shaftesbury became
its President in 1880 and its General Council contained representatives
of the Church of England as well as nonconformists. Its executive
retained a strong Quaker presence.12
The anti-opiumist cause won
continuing support at this period most obviously because of the
ten-year clause contained within the Treaty of Tientsin. The Treaty
stipulated that there should be a revision of its tariff provisions
every ten years. Opium, although imported by foreign merchants, could
be carried into the interior of the country only by the Chinese. When
it left the treaty ports, Chinese officials were at liberty to extract
a heavy duty which was in itself a deterrent to increased import. The
British government had been lobbying for some time before the treaty
revision was imminent in order to facilitate the entry of Indian opium
into China. In 1869, Sir Rutherford Alcock, British Minister in China,
negotiated a revised Convention whereby additional import duties were
to be paid on opium and on exported silk, and the British received
commercial concessions in return. The Alcock Convention was never
ratified. The Liberal government was deluged with memorials, not least
from Sassoon & Co., the largest dealers in Indian opium, and the
matter was left unsettled.13
The spotlight was once again on opium,
however, as a result of these negotiations. In August 1869, when the
Indian budget came before the Commons, several members, Sir Wilfred
Lawson, the prominent temperance campaigner, among them, had condemned
the opium trade. The next year, Lawson put forward a motion condemning
`the system by which a large portion of the Indian revenue is raised
from opium'. It was thrown out by a majority of 104 (196 M.P.s voted).
Lawson's motion and the debate upon it were the prototype of many to
follow over the next quarter of a century and beyond. The terms in
which they were couched might vary - that put forward by Mark Stewart,
Conservative M.P. for Wigton and a member of the Council of the Society
for the Suppression of the Opium Trade (S.S.O.T.), in 1875, for
instance, envisaged the careful consideration of policy regulating the
opium traffic between India and China `with a view to the gradual
withdrawal of the Government of India from the cultivation and
manufacture of opium' (this too was lost by thirtyseven votes). But the
arguments deployed on both sides varied little even if the wording on
the order paper might alter.'' The anti-opium cause was a continuing
political issue from this time onward.
Economic considerations
underlay the political agitation. Despite the importance of opium to
the Indian budget, a peak in export of the drug was in fact reached in
1880. Signs of decline in the importance of opium as an Indian revenue
item were already visible. The old-established opium firms, Jardine
Matheson and Dent and Co. most obviously, were withdrawing from the
market China's own production of the drug was increasing; and the
domestic product, although considered inferior to the Indian, was, at
least cheaper and easier to distribute, in particular clandestinely and
without payment of internal dues. By 1885, China was probably producing
just as much opium as she imported. Leading officials of the Chinese
government still professed moral objection; to the use of the drug; but
since the chaos of the Taiping rebellion local officials were often out
of central control, if indeed there had ever been much direction. The
Indian government in its turn tried to maintain a standard level of
production and hence of prices b3 building up a reserve of opium. But
other crops were also becoming profitable; and many peasants preferred
to grow potatoes o: tobacco rather than opium. In the 1890s, exports of
Indian opium began to decline absolutely as well as relatively. Those
who argue( as part of the anti-opiumist cause that imports into China
o: British manufactured goods showed little increase because of the
odium associated with the opium trade certainly had the statistic of
manufactured goods on their side. British trade with China ha(
increased hardly at all from the late 1860s to the late 1880s, while
trade with Japan had tripled and even quadrupled in the same period. 15
In
the phase of late-Victorian imperialism just beginning in the 1870s,
there were thus clear commercial arguments for replacing the
importation of opium. The anti-slavery and anti-opium agitations had,
in this economic sense, much in common. Alderman McArthur, M. P., in
the chair at the S.S.0.T.'s inaugural meeting emphasized the commercial
argument that the opium trade was, strangling other forms of commerce.
`When the ports were opened by treaty, we expected to do a large trade
with China. Instead of doing the large trade we had anticipated, we
sent to China, with its 400 millions of population, but six million
pounds' worth of exports, while the Australian colonies, with four
millions of people, took as much as fourteen millions pounds' worth of
our goods.'16 The poor Chinese were unwilling to buy British
manufactured goods because of the odium associated with Britain',
involvement in the opium trade - or unable to do so because of the
poverty to which smoking the drug had reduced them. Humanitarianism and
economic self-interest coincided.
The
S.S.O.T., which grew out of these conditions, was very much a pressure
group of the classic Victorian type, conforming quite closely to the
model established by the Anti-Slavery Society and, in the political
sphere, by the Anti-Corn Law League. The Society's work as a pressure
group initially had a dual focus - the creation of an educated public
opinion opposed to the opium trade and the Indian government monopoly
in particular, and parliamentary pressure to obtain definite political
action. The support it attracted came in the religious sphere primarily
from nonconformist and evangelical denominations, with the missionaries
as a distinct and active grouping, increasingly so towards the end of
the century." The established church gave some support: the Bishop of
Durham was one of the Society's earliest supporters. But there were
reservations about the Society's activities in some parts of the Church
of England.18
In the political sense, the Society drew its
parliamentary support primarily from among the Radical, nonconformist
wing of the Liberal Party, with Sir Joseph Pease, Liberal M.P. for
Barnard Castle in Co. Durham, as its leading Commons spokesman. Despite
the adherence of M.n.s who represented working-class constituencies,
the anti-opium movement itself remained, unlike the Anti-Corn Law, or
even the Anti-Slavery, agitations, obstinately elitist. It never
attracted any significant body of working-class support."' The Society
attempted to influence centres of opinion rather than to mobilize mass
political and public support. Provincial political support was
nevertheless important, and the Society adopted tactics commonly used
by other contemporary pressure groups. The Rev. J. B. F. Tinling of
Reading began work as a `missionary' for the Society in 1876. His task
was to establish local auxiliary committees throughout the country, but
although he secured helpers in several towns and visited others, his
task was not an easy one and meetings were often illattended. There is
little evidence that the Society ever achieved any broadly based
political lobbying organization in the provinces. Part of the reason
for its failure to organize any extensive provincial support was its
precarious financial position. In its early years its income barely
reached £1,000 a year and much of this was due to the financial support
given by the Pease family. Although the agitation against the trade
gathered pace, its income did not.
The public opinion it sought to
create was not broad-based, but the opinion of influential elites in
society. The Society attracted its greatest degree of public support in
the early 1880s. Its main practical objective at this time was one on
which many shades of anti-opium opinion could unite. This was the
ratification of the Chefoo Convention of 1876. The Convention had been
negotiated by Sir Thomas Wade, Alcock's successor as British Minister
at Peking, as compensation for the death of Mr Margary, a young
interpreter assassinated in 1875 in Yunnan when about to join a British
exploration party from Burma. The British government used Margary's
murder as the occasion for tidying up some outstanding trading matters,
the import of opium among them. The Convention, instead of
concentrating on the import duty on the drug, as was the case with the
1869 agreement, proposed instead to extend the area of internal
taxation and prepared the way for an indefinite increase in the revenue
which the Chinese government derived from import of the drug. It was
not ratified for the next nine years because of pressure from opium
merchants and the Indian government, both of whom feared that the
Chinese would use it to impose prohibitory duties. The demand for its
ratification thus became the major part of the anti-opiumist cause for
almost a decade. The matter was repeatedly brought before parliament.
In 1883, Pease presented a motion for an address asking that `in all
negotiations which take place between the Governments of Her Majesty
and China, having reference to the Duties levied on opium under the
Treaty of Tientsin... the Government of China will be met as that of an
independent state, having the full right to arrange its own import
Duties.' Pease's motion was lost by a majority of sixty (192 M.P.S
voted), and in a debate in 1881 no division was called.20
The
anti-opiumist cause was a public issue in this period as it was not to
be again until the 1900s. The Society's public activity expanded at an
unprecedented rate. In 188o, election year, the Society placarded its
election address which stressed commercial as well as moral arguments;
and a pamphlet on the opium question was sent to every clergyman and
nonconformist minister in the country." A memorial signed by members of
the Society and other public figures, 361 in all, urging extinction of
the trade as now conducted and `the duty of this country to withdraw
all encouragement from the growth of the poppy in India, except for
strictly medicinal purposes, and to support the Chinese government in
its efforts to suppress the traffic', was presented to Gladstone as
Prime Minister in 1882. Petitions poured into the Commons in support.
In the month prior to the debate on Pease's motion in April 1883,
petitions containing over 75,000 signatures had arrived .22 On 21
October 1881, the crowning public event of the campaign took place - a
meeting at the Mansion House in London with the Lord Mayor in the chair
and both the Archbishop of Canterbury and Cardinal Manning present as
chief supporters. The Lord Mayor made special note of the religious and
political heterogeneity of the gathering. Moral and commercial
heterogeneity were also notable: it was the Archbishop who moved that
`the opium traffic ... is opposed alike to Christian morality and the
commercial interests of this country'.23 In the year 1882-3, there were
18o meetings on the opium trade, three times as many as in the previous
year.24
Anti-opium propaganda material was produced in profusion.
The Society had its own series of tracts. There were publications in
book form such as Justin McCarthy's The Opium War. The Society had its
own journal, the Friend of China, published monthly initially,
bi-monthly from 1879 and monthly again in 1883. This published articles
on the course of the agitation, extracts from newspapers, both foreign
and British, notes of meetings and analyses of every aspect of opium
cultivation, trade and revenue. It was the linchpin of the anti-opium
agitation in these years. Circulation figures were never released, but
its influence extended beyond what was most probably a limited one. The
controversy spilled over into the public journals. The missionary
magazines were of course full of the matter; but anti-opium views were
also publicized among educated middle-class society as a whole .25
There
was no concerted pro-opium organization working on a propaganda basis
to compare with the Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade, and
those who defended the cultivation of opium in India, its import into
China, or its medical and nonmedical use, did so often from a variety
of disparate motives. Some, like Sir George Birdwood and Dr W. J.
Moore, had been connected with the Indian government or in medical
practice in India (Moore was Deputy Surgeon-General of the Bombay
Presidency), while others were in some way connected with the trade. Mr
W. H. Brereton, whose lectures at St James' Hall in 1882 putting the
case against the S.S.O.T. were later republished as The Truth About
Opium (1882), was at one time a Hong-Kong solicitor and legal adviser
to the opium farmers. Sir Robert Hart, Commissioner of the Imperial
Maritime Customs in China, also issued a pamphlet in support of the
opium trade in 1881.26
Perhaps the greatest renegade in the
anti-opiumists' eyes was Sir Rutherford Alcock himself, whose apparent
defection on the opium issue was the source of intense displeasure.
Alcock's views had in fact changed little from the stand he had taken
against the trade during his time in China. He simply maintained that
the trade should be extinguished gradually and with as much good faith
in the matter from the Chinese as from the English point of view.
Nevertheless his earlier attacks on the opium trade, his evidence to
the Select Committee on East Indian finance in 1871 in particular, were
constantly quoted against him. His views were close to the way in which
the trade was in fact ended after 19o6, with both sides committed to
reciprocal diminution of both import and cultivation. It was Alcock who
was the leading speaker at a meeting of the Indian section of the Royal
Society of Arts in 1882 which formed the main forum for the pro-opium
response; it was his articles `Opium and common sense' in Nineteenth
Century in 1881 and `The opium trade' in the Journal of the Society of
Arts in the following year which received the brunt of the attack. 27
The evidence and arguments were bandied back and forth.
How far the
strength of the agitation was responsible for settlement of the Chefoo
question is uncertain. Lord Kimberley, Secretary of State for India,
justified ratification of the Convention to the Indian government by
reason of the strength of anti-opium feeling. 211 But most research on
Victorian pressure groups suggests that they could do little but
confirm government on a course of action on which it had already
decided. 211 Certainly anti-opiumist parliamentary strength was too
small and too divided between the parties to have constituted much of a
political threat. The signing of an additional article to the Chefoo
Convention in 1885 was thus only in part an outcome of the anti-opium
agitation. India's opposition to its ratification had been withdrawn as
early as 1881, and there was also Chinese pressure in its favour. In
1885, Britain signed an additional article whereby all opium on arrival
at a Chinese port was to be placed in a bonded warehouse; on removal,
an import duty was to be paid. Opium would thereafter be freed from all
taxation in the interior of China. By agreeing to the Convention, the
Chinese government had by one move obtained a larger share in the
profits of the opium trade, and surrendered its claim to total
prohibition. The anti-opium movement in England had received a severe
setback; for it could hardly contend that Britain was forcing opium on
China when the Chinese government had shown some eagerness to increase
its share of the profits of the trade.
The year 1885 marked the
apogee of the Society's fortune. Until the early 1 890s, both its
political and its public support decreased. Never again, even in the
early 1900s when its political and parliamentary support was again
rapidly increasing, was it to enjoy the sort of public acceptance
demonstrated in the Mansion House meeting and the other gatherings
which had taken place between 1881 and 1883. In 1886, a motion
brought forward by Sir Joseph Pease dealing with the severance of the
Indian government's connection with poppy cultivation, and the
prohibition of such cultivation in India except for medical purposes,
was a total failure. The House was counted out; and this was a serious
check to the vigour of the anti-opium movement.30 Early enthusiasm had
waned; there were some internal difficulties within the Society and its
financial support had died back.
The years after 1885 saw a
considerable internal weakening of the anti-opium movement. Several
different organizations came into being, partly because there was no
longer an issue on which all could unite, and differences of opinion
over future objectives came to the surface. The S.S.O.T. itself called
a meeting of its council in January 1886 to decide whether it was even
to continue in the same form, and whether a vigilance committee might
not be more suitable for a less strident agitation. Differences of
opinion over whether India or China should be the main focus of
attention led in 1 *,88 to the formation of another anti-opium society.
This was the Christian Union for the Severance of the Connection of the
British Empire with the Opium Traffic. It was closely identified with
the missionary view of things, and missionary influence among its
leadership and supporters was strong. The Union produced its own
journal, National Righteousness, with a low circulation, irregularly
published, and edited by Benjamin Broomhall, secretary of the China
Inland Mission, from 1888 until his death in 1911; the journal itself
continued until 1915. Membership of the Union was, at around 3,000 by
189o, small and static.
Its focus continued to be a Chinese as well
as an Indian one and it argued consistently that although Chinese
domestic production was to be deplored, nevertheless India should
unilaterally abandon her involvement in opium production and should
prohibit the cultivation of opium for all but medical use." There was
in fact little difference in outlook on some issues between the
S.S.O.T. and the Christian Union, and much overlapping in terms of
personalities. There were close personal links, too, with the two other
anti-opium organizations which also formed at this time. The Women's
Anti-Opium Urgency League, established in 1891, had close links with
the Christian Union. The Anti-Opium Urgency Committee was also set up
in 1891; it was appointed by the National Christian Anti-Opium
Convention held in London in March of that year .32
There was no
concrete and accessible political issue on which all shades of
anti-opium opinion could comfortably unite after 1885.. There was a
hardening of attitudes, an absolute response which shifted its emphasis
from China towards India and other British possessions in the Far East.
The campaign concentrated its efforts on the ending of the Indian opium
monopoly and on the restriction of cultivation to the small amounts
required for specifically medical purposes. In this absolute response,
it was supported by the example of the United States, which in 1880 had
signed an immigration treaty with China (not finally enforced by
Congress until 1887) whereby both countries mutually forbade their
subjects to import opium into each other's ports and Americans were
prohibited from trafficking in it within China. Less well known was
America's close involvement in the opium trade between India and China
in the first half of the century. In the 1840s and 1850s two American
companies were dot g business in China in opium to the value of 2
million dollars a year, and Whitelaw Reed, U.S. Minister in China, was
involved in attempts to obtain legalization of the trade. By 1880,
American participation had virtually ceased; and the treaty could
comfortably be signed in the knowledge that it did no harm to her
trading interests. 33 In England, however, the reaction in anti-opium
circles was an encouragement of demands for an absolute response, for
prohibition rather than gradual diminution, for a sudden and final end
to both cultivation and the trade in opium.
The Royal Commission on Opium
In
this new phase of agitation, the anti-opium cause narrowed its basis of
support. There was less of the sort of educated support of
well-meaning liberal society of the early 1880s. Clergymen and
missionaries now figured most prominently and the wider support which
the movement could arouse through petitioning and public meetings came
from members of nonconformist congregations. The new campaign reached
its height between 1889 and 1893, in the years immediately preceding
the appointment and work of the Royal Commission on Opium. The S.S.O.T.
itself had emerged to some degree from the doldrums which had followed
the signing of the additional article. A new secretary, J. G.
Alexander, a Quaker barrister, managed to organize a revival of the
agitation. 34 The Society's greatest success came in parliament. A
motion in 1889 had been lost. But on 10 April 1891 Pease's motion in
the Commons that the Indian opium revenue was `morally indefensible',
and that the Indian government should cease to grant licences for
anything but the cultivation of the opium poppy for medical purposes
and should stop the transit of Malwa opium across British territory,
was won by 160 to 130 votes.35
The greatest hope of some success in
moves against opium came in 1892 with the election of a Liberal
government led by Gladstone. In 1891 many Conservative M.P.s had
abstained on Pease's motion because of their unwillingness to vote
against the government; most of its support had come from Liberal
ranks. There were estimates to be around 240 supporters of the
anti-opium cause in the new House of Commons. Known anti-opiumists in
the government included Asquith at the Home Office, CampbellBannerman
at the War Office, Sir Edward Grey as Foreign Secretary, and, perhaps
most significantly, George Russell, Parliamentary Secretary at the
India Office. Gladstone himself had not voted on Pease's motion in
1891, but his speeches during his Midlothian campaign had given the
impression that he retained the sympathy with the anti-opium cause
which he had shown as a young man. 36
The Society's cause had much
in its favour. But tactically it mismanaged the issue. Moves to
amalgamate all the anti-opium groupings into one concerted organization
failed, and the antiopiumists met opposition in a divided and
disorganized state. For the main stumbling block was opposition to
ending the trade in the centres of power. Lord Kimberley, Secretary of
State for India, was resolutely in favour of the opium trade and he
received tacit encouragement from Gladstone. Pease and the S.S.O.T.
were consistently outmanoeuvred. Kimberley's opposition destroyed all
the Society's attempts to obtain a motion worded so that both the
government and the anti-opiumists could agree on it.S7 The
anti-opiumist motion as introduced by Alfred Webb moved for a Royal
Commission, but one to inquire into the re-structuring of Indian
revenue when the suppression of the opium trade had been carried out.
The government amendment, on the other hand, left the question more
open. The Commission was to inquire into the whole question of the
production and consumption of opium in India, to see whether it should
be prohibited except for medical purposes. Webb's motion was rejected
and the government motion then adopted without a division. The
anti-opiumists had not followed up the 1891 victory as well as they
might." But the S.S.O.T. had hopes that the Commission would in any
case produce the sort of report which anti-opium opinion would like to
see.
This did not happen; and the Report of the Royal Commission as
published in 1895 has long been regarded as whitewashing the Indian
opium question. In its initial composition there was little sign of
this, for the Commission had a full complement of both anti-opium and
pro-opium members. Presided over by Lord Brassey, it had among its
members Indian notables, R. G. C. Mowbray, a Conservative M.P. opposed
to interference with the trade, as well as Arthur Pease, brother of Sir
Joseph, and a member of the General Council of the S.S.O.T., and Henry
Wilson, M.P., representing the anti-opiumist cause. Sir J. B. Lyall,
former Governor-General of the. Punjab and also a member of the
Commission, remarked in a letter to Lansdowne, the Viceroy, as it began
its work, that its main purpose was the silencing of the anti-opium
agitation. `The facts of the case are all really well known enough, and
the object appears to be to get an expression of opinion, of native
opinion in particular, which will carry sufficient weight to enable the
question to be shelved.'39
The Commission can hardly be accused of
neglecting its duty. Beginning with sittings in London in September
1893, it travelled to India in November, early in December dividing in
two, with one half visiting Burma. It travelled from Calcutta in the
New Year to Patna, Benares, Lucknow and Delhi before reaching Bombay,
and ended its public sittings on 22 February 1894. Having asked 29,000
questions of 723 witnesses and collected 2,500 pages of evidence, it
produced a report which justified the existing situation. It found that
the evil effects of opium eating in India had been greatly exaggerated,
drew parallels between its moderate use and that of alcohol and claimed
that the state monopoly established in India really amounted to
restriction of cultivation, since this was confined to definite areas.
The Commissioners also considered that the Indian revenue could not at
present afford the financial loss entailed by prohibition, and put the
burden of action on the Chinese government if it wished the importation
of opium forbidden. It denied the connection which had been made
between opiate use and crime, and refused to believe that the Indian
government's connection with opium was any barrier to the spread of
Christianity. It stood out for the continuing acceptance of what was an
accepted part of Indian culture -'opium is extensively used for
non-medical and quasi-medical purposes, in some cases with benefit, and
for the most part without injurious consequences. The non-medical uses
are so interwoven with the medical uses that it would not be
practicable to draw a distinction between them in the distribution and
sale of the drug.40
To an extent, the Commission was a whitewash.
Its Indian sittings were carefully managed by the government of India.
Staffing was provided by the Indian Civil Service and the Commissioners
were conducted about the country by those in the employ of the
government. Henry Wilson wrote a strongly dissenting minority report,
and the Commission was subjected to detailed scrutiny by Joshua
Rowntree, employed by the S.S.O.T.41 In some respects, however, the
anti-opium case had been defeated not by unfair stage management but by
the realities of Indian experience. J. G. Alexander, who accompanied
the Commissioners to India, himself pointed out while in Bombay that
the time there had been `in some respects discouraging, as we have
heard from so many quarters where we should have expected sympathy,
that the evil is greatly exaggerated...'. However, meetings with
American missionaries, `who have really gone below the surface in this
matter', had 'confirmed prejudices' .42 Wilson and Alexander worked
hard at finding anti-opium testimony, but this proved difficult;
Alexander Wilson, Henry's son, who accompanied them, himself noted how
rarely the opium-besotted addict of the anti-opium tracts appeared in
practice. The Earl of Elgin, who had succeeded Lansdowne as Viceroy
while the Commission was sitting, wrote to Godley at the India Office
in February 1 894 that the anti-opiumists had admitted `that the case
in India has broken down' .43 Striking testimony to this was the
conversion of Arthur Pease, who signed the majority report and was
asked to resign from the S.S.O.T. as a result.
The Commission was
less of a cover-up than the anti-opiumists proclaimed, and succeeding
analyses have been less than rigorous in their wholesale acceptance of
the anti-opium point of view on the Royal Commission. The
anti-opiumists had been outmanoeuvred at every turn; and the
publication of the report in 1895 marked the beginning of a decade of
stagnation for the movement. There was a hasty unification of
anti-opium forces in 1894. The Representative Board of Anti-Opium
Societies was set up under the chairmanship of Joshua Rowntree when it
was realized that the Commission's report was likely to be pro-opium in
its conclusions. But there was little anti-opiumists could do to
disguise the defeat it represented. A motion introduced by Pease in May
1 895 drawing attention to the report and seeking the ending of the
opium trade was decisively defeated by 176 votes to 59; and increased
resignations from the ranks of the Society testified to the feeling of
its members.44 The British anti-opium movement did not revive until the
early 1900s. Not until change occurred in China, and in England a
Liberal government fully committed to ending the trade came to power,
did it recover the political and public initiative it had lost ten
years before.
The anti-opium case and English experience
Many
of the standard arguments expressed in this nineteenth-century campaign
bore little relation to English experience. It was for
instance, hotly debated whether the British government had in fact
forced opium on China, or whether the Chinese had known and used the
drug long before the Indian trade in it began, whether the Chinese were
sincere or not in their wish to suppress opium or whether the opium
trade was injurious to British manufactured goods. The campaign
nevertheless did have a significant domestic impact, in particular in
contributing to changed perceptions of domestic opium use. There are
obvious dangers in exaggerating the anti-opium cause as a public issue
in England in the last quarter of the century. The vehemence of the
anti-opiumist argument, the sheer volume of propaganda, the energy put
into organizing public meetings, petitions and parliamentary motions,
could and clearly did at some stages disguise lack of public interest
and a failing financial base. But at certain periods the anti-opium
movement clearly was of public importance and its arguments of domestic
interest. Its arguments involved opium eating as well as opium smoking;
and much time and energy were spent in discussing which was the most
harmful (or harmless). Every variety of opinion on the subject was to
be found. Some who favoured the continuance of the trade defended opium
smoking by emphasizing the correspondingly greater danger of eating the
drug. Sir George Birdwood put this point of view in a letter to The
Times in 1881: `The habitual eating and drinking of opium are
altogether different.... Opium taken internally is a powerful and
dangerous narcotic stimulant, but even so, it is no worse in the
effects produced by excessive use than alcohol."' In the 1890s, with
greater interest in Indian opium use came increased emphasis on eating
the drug. The anti-opiumists presented both as harmful - or opium
smoking as less harmful than opium eating.
The debate was confused -
Alcock for instance, in his discussion of the effects of smoking,
blithely introduced evidence relating to opium eating without
attempting to differentiate - but it continually referred to English
experience. The question of the sale and availability of opium, whether
for eating or smoking, and of the medical use of the drug was debated
very much in the light of knowledge of English narcotic use. The
example of the Fens was widely quoted by those who held that opium was
valuable as a febrifuge and a prophylactic against malaria; and the
examples of De Quincey, Coleridge and even Wilkie Collins were taken as
illustrative of the effects of opium eating. The possibility of
`stimulant' opiate use among the English working class was indicative
of the dangers of taking a tolerant attitude towards opiate use in
China. The old bogey of working-class use found new life as part of the
anti-opium cause.46
English experience with opium was at once both a
warning and an example in the agitation against the Indo-Chinese trade.
The anti-opiumists really tried to have the best of both worlds. For
the legal position of opium in England was seen, at various times, as a
model of restriction which the Indian government would do well to
follow - or dangerously lax, and an argument for further domestic
control. The latter argument was particularly popular in the first
stage of the Society's existence.47 The need ,for further domestic
regulation was a continuing theme into the early 1880s. But the
argument from domestic experience was also turned on its head. The
restrictions, however lax, which applied in England were certainly an
improvement on the open availability of the drug in India. The
anti-opium organizations made great play of this differing legal
reaction to the sale and availability of opium. A fable for children by
Dr Emily Headland, The Lady Britannia, Her Children, Her Step-children
and Her Neighbours, pointed the contrast. Lady Britannia, `a loving
mother', had found that many of her children had a fancy for opium,
`which she evidently thinks injurious, for she takes pains to prevent
them from obtaining it Anyone who sells it to them without its being
labelled "Poison", meets with her severe condemnation.' With her
step-children however, it was different. `They had been badly brought
up before she took them in hand; she now sends them tutors and
Governors ... and is in many respects a model step-mother.... It
certainly is a strange thing, if she had any love for them, that she
should let them buy this opium to their hearts content."' This
'pharmaceutical imperialism' was heightened in the anti-opium campaign
of the 1890s. Pease, introducing his 1891 motion, pointed out the need
for the Indian system of sale to be brought in line with the English
one; and a declaration supposedly signed by 5,000 medical men in 1892
made the same point. At the same time, the S.S.O.T. was agitating for a
tightening-up of English poisons regulations. The end result was a
greater general emphasis on the need for domestic as well as Indian
restriction.
The
anti-opium debate was in this way responsible for helping to create a
climate of opinion which saw increased restriction as desirable
and it began the tradition of relating the Far Eastern situation very
specifically to domestic English experience. It also had a more precise
influence. The moral ideology it expounded was linked with disease
views of addiction. The supposedly 'scientific' basis of the disease
point of view in many respects marked only the medical reformulation of
anti-opium commonplaces. It was hardly surprising that, in a debate
where opium was concerned, the medical profession should have played a
considerable part. The medical inutility of opium was after all one of
the planks of the anti-opium case and this naturally brought English
medical men quite centrally into the debate, whether from a pro-opium
or anti-opium point of view 49
The medical component in the
anti-opium ranks was notable. The S.S.O.T.'s Council included medical
men. Its election address in 188o was signed by Risdon Bennett,
President of the Royal College of Physicians and a Vice-President of
the Society. The most clear-cut anti-opiumist medical influence,
however, came through the small cadre of addiction specialists. The
development of the anti-opium movement paralleled that of addiction as
a medical specialism; and many of the doctors most active in
formulating concepts of addiction were also active in the moral
agitation. Benjamin Ward Richardson, who had been one of the first
English doctors to write extensively about morphine addiction and its
treatment, was a Vice-President of the Society, organizing for it in
1892 a conference on the medical aspects of the opium question. Brigade
Surgeon Robert Pringle, another prolific writer and speaker on
addiction, was in fact a paid official of the S.S.O.T. Pringle was
equally at home addressing an antiopiumist gathering, or one organized
by the Society for the Study of Inebriety; he was a regular speaker at
the latter's meetings. 50 Norman Kerr, a temperance advocate who had
founded a total abstinence society while at university in Glasgow, was
another addiction specialist who moved easily between the anti-opium
and specialist medical worlds. 51 Professor Arthur Gamgee, too, Dean of
the Medical School at Owen's College, Manchester, and a writer on
addiction, was the main speaker at a meeting held in Manchester Free
Trade Hall in 1882, delivering a strenuous rejection of Birdwood's
letter in The Times.52
The
involvement of such men in the moral campaign strengthened the moral
bias within the medical concept of addiction. There were
striking parallels between medical opinion and moral propaganda on the
subject. The anti-opium movement was not simply the custodian of a
`vice' view of opiate use in contrast to medical disease terminology.
There was considerable cross-fertilization between the two. Both
adopted the fundamental distinction between medical and non-medical use
of opium which was to inform the international control agreements and
subsequent domestic narcotic policy. Theories of addiction, as
formulated in the late nineteenth century, largely ignored those whose
use of the drug was not iatrogenic in origin. There was little place
for those whose habit arose from `viciousness' or `curiosity'. The
anti-opium agitation constantly and consistently stressed this point,
too. Whereas medical use of the drug was perfectly acceptable,
non-medical usage was not. The motions brought before the Commons aimed
at the prohibition of poppy cultivation in India, `except to supply the
legitimate demand of opium for medical purposes'. The views of the
anti-opium movement supported the medical exclusiveness of disease
theories. Both attempted to establish a form of medical uniformity
which bore little relation to the actual usage of the drug in the Far
East. There was in fact a close relationship between the use of the
drug as a luxury and as a medicine. So far as perceptions of domestic
English narcotics were involved, the medical/non-medical distinction
bore more relation to reality. The use of opium was by the 1 890s less
of the everyday non-medical occurrence it had once been.
The
anti-opiumists, like most medical specialists, saw moderate opiate use
as impossible. Dosage was ever-increasing and addiction inevitable. The
existence of a class of moderate opium users was one of the hardest
fought issues in the whole opium debate." This was a continuing theme
in anti-opium as well as medical literature right from the start of the
anti-opium campaign. The existence of such moderate users, if
accepted,. would undermine both the case for ending the cultivation of
the poppy and the medical argument that all regular users of the drug
were the proper concern of the profession. Doctors like Kerr and
Richardson gave medical sanction to the denial of moderation.54 Yet the
opposed point of view again cited English as well as Indian experience,
holding that moderate use was not just possible, but positively
beneficial in certain circumstances. Dr Farquharson, in the course of
the 1891 debate on Pease's motion,quoted the example of a friend of his, dying from consumption. At dinner,
He
got through the early part very well, but began to flag about the
middle. He went out, and when he returned he said to me, `Do you know
what I went away for? I went away to give myself a subcutaneous
injection of morphia.' When he came back he was cheerful, and was
stimulated in a way I am sure no small dose of alcohol or a tonic could
have stimulated him. I have not the least hesitation in saying that a
moderate use of this stimulant preserved that poor man's life certainly
for a year or two. 55
The anti-opiumist description of the opium
user, whether smoker, eater or injector of morphine, inevitably dealt
with his moral as well as physical descent. Addiction was the cause not
simply of bodily deterioration, but of lapsed moral sense as well. 56
English examples were quoted to make the point 57 The medical
declaration of 1892 saw the habit as morally as well as physically
debasing. The anti-opiumist argument, like that of the addiction
specialists, was essentially drug-centred and lacking a social
dimension. Anti-opiumist propaganda considered opium smoking in China
and eating the drug in India in isolation from the social and cultural
factors which sustained it. Dr James Maxwell, for instance, speaking at
the 1892 medical conference, stressed that the habit was far worse
among poor than among wealthy opium smokers. It was among the Chinese
working class `that we see the evil effects of opium in an
unmistakeable way'. English views of addiction displayed a similar
social ignorance.
In fact the anti-opium movement was, in much of
its propaganda, a form of justification for the medical control of
opiate use currently being established. Anti-opiumists were well aware
of the disease point of view (both Levinstein and Kane's works were
publicized in the Friend of China); and the moral emphasis of the
movement's own arguments was translated into scientific respectability
through the medium of doctors active in both spheres. The anti-opium
movement can hardly be said to have disseminated views hostile to
opiate use throughout the British public even by the end of the
century. Only in the early 1 880s did it gain a wide degree of public
support - and this did not extend very far down in society.
Although
anti-opiumist arguments were by 1895 apparently defunct, they lived on
in Britain at least through the views of a significant section of the
medical profession. It was by means of the elite of medical specialists
in addiction that the anti-opiumist standpoint was still effectively
expressed.
References
1.
For details of the opium trade, and the opium wars, see M. Greenberg,
British Trade and the Opening of China, r800-5842 (Cambridge University
Press, 1951); M. Goldsmith, The Trial of Opium (London, Hale, 1939); L.
P. Adams I I, `China: the historical setting of Asia's profitable
plague', pp. 365-83 in A. W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in South
East Asia (New York, Harper and Row, 1972); H. Morse, The International
Relations of the Chinese Empire (London, Longmans, Green, 1910-18); and
D. E. Owen, British Opium Policy in China and India (New Haven, Yale
University Press, 1934).
2. Hansard S3 (1840), cols. 743, 855-6 etc.
3. Hansard 68 (1843), col. 362 onward.
4. Hansard 3rd ser. 544 (1857), col. 2027 onward. 5. R. Little, op. cit., pp. 524-38.
6. Hansard (1843), op. cit., cols. 400-401. There was also a Society for Suppressing Opium Smuggling.
7.
Some publications of the Society are held in the Braithwaite
Collection, Society of Friends, Ms. Vol. 207. See also R. Alexander,.
The Rise and Progress of British Opium Smuggling (London, 3rd edn, Judd
and Glass, 1856).
8. Details of the appeal are in the Braithwaite Collection, already cited. The appeal was made on to September 1858.
9. It was mentioned in the Medical Times and Gazette, 59 (1859) P• 387.
10.
For details of the origin and early activities of the Society seethe
early issues of its journal, the Friend of China, in particular I
(1875) PP. 37, 2 (1875), p. 72, and 6 (1875), pp. 206-7. There are also
details in H. G. Alexander, Joseph Gurney Alexander (London, Swarthier
Press, 1920); M. J. B. C. Liz, `Britain and the termination of the
IndiaChina opium trade, 1905-13'(unpublished London Ph.D. thesis,
1969), pp. 24-6; P. D. Lowes, The Genesis of International Narcotics
Control (Geneva, Librairie Droz, 1966), pp. 58-63; and F. S. Turner,
British Opium Policy and its Results to India and China (London,
Sazpson Low, 1876). B. Johnson, `Righteousness before revenue: the
forgotten crusade against the Indo-Chinese opium trade', Journal of
Drug Issues, S (1975) pp. 304-26, gives a survey of its activities.
11. `Introductory address', Friend of China, 5 (1875) P. 5
12.
Details of the Society's membership, executive committee etc. were
regularly listed inside the front cover of the Friend of China.
13.
Details of the Treaty of Tientsin, the revised 1869 Convention and the
negotiations are in M. J. B. C. Liz, op. cit., p. 1g; and D. E. Owen,
op. Cit., Pp. 242-6.
14.
Some of the motions put forward, and
debates on them, are in Hansard, 3rd ser. 205 (1870), col. 480 onward;
3rd ser. 225 (1875), col. 571 onward; 3rd ser. 230 (1875), col.
536 onward; 3rd ser. 252 (1880), col. 1227; 3rd ser. 277 (1883), col.
1333.
15.
Details of the trading relations between India and China are in D. E.
Owen, op. cit., pp. 281, 291, 309-1o, and M. B. Morse, op. cit., vol.
3, PP. 438-9. I am grateful to Dr Kato Yuzo for showing me unpublished
trade statistics he has collected. These confirm the decline in
relative importance of the Indo-Chinese opium trade as an item of
Indian revenue in the 1880s and 1890s.
16. The anti-opium and
anti-slavery movements also had some organizational and personal
overlap. The two Sturge brothers, Edmund and Joseph, founders of the
British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, were also members of the
S.S.O.T.'s Executive Committee. Alderman McArthur's comment was
reported in Friend of China, 1 (1875), p. 6.
17. Friend of China, 3 (1877), pp. 67 and 71-5.
18.
Lambeth Palace Library, Tait papers, vol. 21o, ff106-7, shows
Archbishop Tait's reservations about associating himself with the
Society.
19. Friend of China, 2 (1877), p. 159; 11 (189o), p. 34o.
20.
The matter was brought before the Lords in 1878 by the Earl of Aberdeen
and in 1879 by the Earl of Carnarvon, and in 188o, 1881 and 1883 in the
Commons by Sir Joseph Pease. Hansard 3rd set. 252 (188o), col. 1227;
3rd ser. 277 (1883), col. 1333.
21. Details of these lobbying and
pressure group activities are to be found in Friend of China, 3 (1877),
p. 67; 4 (1880), pp. 90-92, 143; 4 (1881), PP. 252, 367-9.
22.
Lambeth Palace Library, Tait papers, vol. 286, ff228-31; H. G.
Alexander, op. cit., pp. 59-61; Hansard (1883), op. cit., col. 1333.
23.
The meeting appears as a high point in most reminiscences of the
campaign, e.g. B. Broomhall, The Truth about Opium Smoking (London,
Hodder and Stoughton, 1882), p. 5 ; R. Alcock, `Opium and common
sense', Nineteenth Century, I0 (,881), pp. 854-68.
24. Friend of China, 6 (1883), PP. 168-87.
25.
As, for instance, in a series of articles written by Edward Fry, a High
Court judge and anti-opium supporter: E. Fry, `China, England and
opium', Contemporary Review, 27 (1875-6), pp. 447-59; 30 (1877), PP.
r-10; and 31 (1877-8), PP. 313-21.
26. W. H. Brereton, The Truth about Opium (London, W. H. Allen, 1882).
27.
R. Alcock, op. cit., and `The opium trade', Journal of the Society of
Arts, 30 (1882), pp. 2o1-35. Even a leading Chinese anti-opiumist like
Li Hung-Chung, who supported the Society's agitation, condoned the
cultivation of opium in his own province; Alcock's demand for a
reciprocal guarantee was hardly excessive. Among other contributors to
this debate were A. J. Arbuthnot, `The opium controversy', Nineteenth
Century, 11 (1882), pp. 403-13; B. Fossett Lock, `The opium trade and
Sir Rutherford Alcock', Contemporary Review, 41 (1882), pp. 676-93; and
F. Storrs Turner, `Opium and England's duty', Nineteenth Century, it
(1882), pp. 242-53.
28. P. D. Lowes, op. cit., p. 65
29.
N. McCord, The Anti-Corn Law League (London, George Allen and Unwin,
1958), pp. 203-4, makes this point about the eventual effect of the
activities of that pressure group.
30. Hansard, 3rd ser. 305 (1886), col. 278.
31.
Details of the discussions over strategy and tactics are in Braithwaite
Collection, op. cit., Ms. Vol. 207; and National Righteousness,
no.1(1887) and other issues, published irregularly in 1889 and 189o.
32.
Further details are in Braithwaite Collection, op. cit., and National
Righteousness. Rachel Braithwaite, secretary of the Women's AntiOpium
Urgency League, was sister of J. Bevan Braithwaite, chairman of the
Christian Union. There were many similar personal links between the
anti-opium organizations.
33. A. H. Taylor, American Diplomacy and
the Narcotics Traffics 1900-39 (Durham, N.C., Duke University Press,
1969), pp. 12, 16, 18-19.
34. H. G. Alexander, op. cit., p. 63; Braithwaite Collection, vol. 207; and Friend of China, II (1889), pp. 59-63.
35.
Hansard, 3rd ser. 352 (1891), col. 285; see also W. T. Wu, The Chinese
Opium Question in British Opinion and Action (New York, Academy Press,
1928), p. 126.
36. Friend of China, 12 (1891), p. 84; and National Righteousness, no. 9 (1892), P. 14.
37.
Details of the manoeuvring between the government and the S.S.O.T. are
in the Society's Executive Committee minutes 1891-3, Temp. Mss 33/2,
Society of Friends Library. Archbishop Benson had also been privately
lobbying for a Royal Commission : Benson papers 189, vol. 99, ff61-4
and 69-71; vol. 109, ff366-7 and 368-9; vol. 110, ff49-5o and ff51-4,
Lambeth Palace Library.
38. Hansard, 4th ser. 14 (1893), col. 591 onward; National Righteousness, no. 14 (1894), P. 3.
39. Quoted in M. J. B. C. Lim, op. cit., p. 32.
40. P.P. 1895, XLI II: Final Report of the Royal Commission on Opium, P. 133.
41. J. Rowntree, The Imperial Drug Trade (London, Methuen, 1905), pp. 152, 163.
42. H. G. Alexander, op. cit., p. 66.
43. Quoted in M. J. B. C. Lim, op. cit., p. 35.
44.
Hansard, 4th ser. 34 (1895), cola. 278-324; Society for the Suppression
of the Opium Trade Executive minutes, 1894-5; The Times 23 May 1895.
45. The Times, 6 December 1881.
46.
As for example in F. W. Chesson, `The opium trade',
Fortnightly Review, n.s. to (2871), pp. 351-7; J. Dudgeon, `Opium
in relation to population'. Edinburgh Medical journal, 23 (1877),
PP. 239-50; P. Hehir, Opium: Its Physical, Moral and Social Effects
(London, Bailliere, Tindall and Cox, 1894), PP. 3o7, 322-3.
47. In
1879, after a Lincolnshire chemist had asked for advice on how one of
his customers could leave off her habit, the Friend of China urged
stricter safeguards on the sale of poisons in England. The Japanese
model, by which the government alone could sell opium, was favoured.
See `Opium Eating in England', Friend of China, 3 (1879), PP. 314-16.
48.
E. Headland, The Lady Britannia, Her Children, Her Stepchildren, and
Her Neighbours (1892), Braithwaite Collection, Ms. Vol. 207; Friend of
China, 13 (1892), pp. 164-5.
49. Most of the polemical literature
produced in the anti-opium campaign contained some consideration of the
medicinal value of opium; e.g. .L. Arnold, ed., The Opium Question
Solved by Anglo-Indian (London, S. W Partridge, 1882), pp. 15-16; G. H.
M. Batten et al., `The opium question', Journal of the Society of Arts,
40 (1892), pp. 444-94.
50. Richardson's conference was reported in a
supplement to the Friend of China, 13 (1892); Pringle's appointment as
a lecturer is discussed in the Society's Executive minutes for 1893.
His contributions to the S.S.I. included R. Pringle, `Opium -has it any
use, other than a strictly medicinal one?', Proceedings of the Society
for the Study of Inebriety, 39 (1894), pp. 3-16; and `Acquired
insanity, in its relation to intemperance in alcohol and narcotics',
ibid., 57 (1898) p. 2.
51. For Kerr's involvement, see Friend of
China, II (1889), pp. 67-70; and `Medical Debate in London', ibid., r6
(1896), pp. 129-31.
52. Friend of China, 5 (1882), PP. 36, 56, 58.
53. See for example J. Dudgeon, `The opium traffic from a medical point of view', Friend of China, 2 (1876), pp. 12-17.
54.
Supplement to the Friend of China, 13 (1892), op. cit. See also `An
Opium Experience', anti-opium tract, Leaflet series no. 8, Braithwaite
Collection, Ms. Vol. 207.
55. Hansard (1892), op. cit., col. 313.
56. J. Dudgeon (Friend of China), op. cit., p. 13. 57. Friend of China, 6 (1883), PP. 127-8.