[For the National Magazine.] THE OPIUM TRADE IN THE EAST.

THE

ITS CHARACTER AND EFFECTS.

HE efforts of the English government, put forth through its commissioner, Sir Henry Pottinger, failed in securing the legalization of the opium trade, and Sir Henry's "prospects of eventual success" have also proved a failure, while the trade is still contraband, and accompanied with all the vices of a smuggling traffic. The trade, as we have seen, still continues, and has grown into fearful magnitude. It is carried on with boldness and impunity. No more edicts are promulgated against it; no more efforts are made to suppress it. Has the policy of the Chinese government changed? No; while the eastern coast of China was yet smoking with the blood of her children, the government refused to sanction the infamous traffic, or to derive a revenue from the wretchedness of its subjects. The government is powerless. The exchequer is drained. The army is corrupted and enervated. Poverty and wretchedness everywhere abound in that country, which a century ago was pronounced one of the richest on the globe. Rebellion, civil war, and local riots and insurrections, are ravaging the entire country.

But, if the policy of the government has not changed with regard to the traffic, why, since the war with England, has it made no further resistance? We may read the answer in the circumstances we have just mentioned. Add to these the dread of British arms, and the universal opinion that the trade is encouraged and defended by the British government. But to discover that the policy of the government and the wishes of a vast majority of the people are still opposed to the trade, we need but look upon the sullen frowns that gather on the countenances of thousands of the Chinese in the presence of the foreigner; we need but witness the manifestations of the deep hatred of the foreign name that rankles in the Chinaman's bosom; we need but mark the expression of powerless despair that appears upon his features; we need but hear the perpetual reiterations of the charge of smugglers of opium and destroyers of the country that are ringing forever in the ears of the missionary, meeting him on the street, in his chapel, and at his very home;

we need but listen to the complaints of fathers, and witness the tears of mothers and sisters whose murdered sons and brothers have fallen as victims to the seductive poison; we need but look upon the anguish of despairing wives, whose soulless husbands are about to sell them to gratify their unconquerable lust for opium, and the tears and sobs of daughters just emerging into womanhood to be sold into prostitution by imbruted fathers, the victims of the unyielding drug. The fathers and the mothers, the wives and the daughters of China, idolatrous heathens as they are, have hearts that can feel and eyes that can weep, and we have seen those hearts bleeding, and have watched those tears, as they wept for fallen husbands, sons, and brothers, and implored our aid to rescue them from the grasp of the fatal habit. O, could the three hundred and sixty millions of Chinese subjects send forth one simultaneous voice on this terrific traffic, from three hundred millions of that people would break out a loud and deep anathema which would startle India, and which would make even the throne and Parliament of England tremble, as its dying echoes reiterated, No opium! No opium!

Whatever opinions may have been entertained before the war, (and we ask how any man in his senses, with the facts before him which we have adduced, could be deceived with regard to the invariable policy of the government?) now it must be universally admitted that the traffic in opium is downright smuggling; and, however unpalatable the dreadful fact may be to the accomplished gentlemen and princely merchants who are engaged in the trade, they can only be esteemed as smugglers, and must, in the eyes of all conscientious and upright men, take their places among this degraded, and in enlightened countries, most detested class. We can distinguish between the trader and his trade, and yet we cannot forget the old Spanish proverb, that "a man is known by the company he keeps," and yet one of the defenders of the trade in the Chinese Repository, himself a merchant and a dealer in what he calls "the elegant luxury," can go no further in his claims for respectability for himself and his compeers in the traffic, than to be associated with the rum and gin traffickers, the keepers of gambling-houses and race-horses, &c., in

England. He is welcome to his company. The merchants in China dealing in opium are, in the ordinary acceptation of the term, gentlemen. They are well educated and refined, intelligent and accomplished in all the arts and elegancies of social life. We need not say they are men of enormous wealth-their business proves this; and we are glad to acknowledge that, in many instances, they have made munificent donations for benevolent purposes. In commercial probity they are unsurpassed; their talents as men of business would do honor to the first commercial houses of Europe or America; yet I would not for all the wealth of India have their consciences, or participate in their unworthy trade.

We have already said that one of the most painful features connected with this traffic is the character of the princely merchants engaged in it. They are not low, vulgar, degraded outlaws-they are gentlemen of intelligence and fortune. They are not ruined or bankrupt tradesmen, whose poverty might be pleaded as a palliation of their crime; they are men who count their wealth by hundreds of thousands, and some by millions. They are not themselves marauders, and masters of well-armed brigantines; they are the respectable employers of the former, and the princely owners of the latter. They are not low, ignorant, and impoverished retailers of the fatal poison, or they would long ago have inherited the contempt and hatred of the world; and those arms which once defended their trade, would have been employed in driving them from the coasts of China, as the guilty destroyers of human life, and as working the ruin of legitimate trade. But does the character of these merchantprinces, who smuggle into China, not cakes, but thousands of chests, diminish the enormity or palliate the evils of the opium traffic? Is he any the less a smuggler, because he forces into the country his contraband product in large cargoes? Is he any the less the guilty author of the evils which are heaped upon this third part of the human race by his pernicious traffic, because he rolls in wealth, and supplies the fatal cause of ruin in thousands of packages? Is he exempt from the crime of bringing ruin, and poverty, and desolation, and death upon millions of Chinese, because he lives in elegance, and VOL. VI.-4

works this desolation, not by his hands, but by his orders? Is he free from all the fatal collisions, the piracies, the murders, and the violence which attend the smuggling of opium, because he himself, perhaps, was never on board a "Fastcrab" or 66 a Scrambling-dragon," but simply gives employment to the unprincipled owners of these boats, and uses as instruments the very worst of characters, the Lascar, the Chinese pirate, murderer, and robber? Ask not these questions of the guilty trader;-faults in his life have breeded errors in his brain, and he cannot answer them. But ask them at the bar of God; ask them at the tribunal of human conscience; ask them at the doors of the ruined millions of Chinese; ask them at the graves of victimized thousands, and if the ghosts of these opium victims were furnished with an instrument whose tones could reach our material senses, they would give an answer which would startle even the seared consciences of these traders in death.

But we must pass on to consider the effects of the opium traffic. One of the most striking is the impoverishment of the empire by the immense drainage of specie which it produces. This began to be noticed and felt by the government and people many years ago, and as early as the year 1838 called forth several memorials from high officials and from the first men of the nation. It was one of these memorials, presented by the President of the Sacrificial Court in 1838, which awakened the government anew to opposition to the traffic, and which produced those decided efforts to suppress the trade which gave offense to the British government, and drew down upon the Chinese the force of the British navy. In this memorial the President refers His Majesty and the Cabinet to the former prosperity of the em pire, and then brings before them the evidences of embarrassment and impoverishment which everywhere prevailed in the country. He shows the nature of these embarrassments; and in a masterly manner traces them to the contraband opium traffic, by showing the nature and extent of this trade and entering into figures to show the manner and the exact extent of the drainage produced by this trade. He concludes his memorial by showing, from the constant expansion and increase of the trade, that the time is not

:

Importation of opium under the British flag $19,471,238 Total imports. 34,900,662 Importation of opium under the American flag 275,621 General trade, 8,201,480

In the British trade the importation of opium is considerably more than one half of the sum of imports; in the American trade the value of opium is not onethirtieth of the value of the imports into China. In Hunt's Merchant's Magazine for March, 1843, we are favored with a table exhibiting the exports of the United States to China, during a period of twenty years, from 1821 to 1841, from which it appears that during this period the sum of the exports was $49,588,360, of which nearly three-fourths was in specie, viz., $32,435,433. The writer in the Magazine

says::

"The export of specie direct from the United States has of late years decreased, in consequence of the use of drawn bills on London, which were equivalent to specie, inasmuch as they reduced the quantity of specie to be sent from China to the British possessions. From these statements, it appears that the United States and Great Britain together have pur

chased of China, independently of opium, annually, about eight million dollars worth more of goods than the Chinese have purchased in return. This eight millions has been paid to China by the United States, and it and an additional eight to nine millions have been extracted from China, in specie, by the sale of opium, which has grown to be the most valuable staple of the British East India possessions."

In other words, the British trade in opium is sufficient to pay for all the silks, teas, &c., exported out of China by Great Britain and the United States, absorbs all the specie conveyed to China by American merchants, and leaves a balance of eight or nine millions of dollars to be paid by the Chinese. While this exhibits the perpetual drain on the resources of China, it also exhibits the dilemma into which American merchants are thrown. The opium trade gives to British merchants almost a monopoly of the whole Chinese trade, or at least makes them the masters of the trade, rendering it necessary for American dealers to pay as high prices, in specie, for tea, silks, &c., as they pay in opium; and, holding in their hands the balance of trade, American specie is ab

sorbed in paying this balance, thus making the merchants of the United States support the very system which gives to their British competitors so great an advantage.

While these results of the trade prove a constant and ruinous drainage from the resources of China, the country itself everywhere presents to the eye of the observer unmistakable evidences of gene

ral impoverishment. When we read the descriptions of China as given in the works of the early Jesuit missionaries, we look upon the vast empire which they describe as one of great wealth and prosperity. We are charmed with their gorgeous descriptions; we look with astonishment upon the evidences spread out before us of the enormous wealth and magnificence of the Chinese empire; we read with satisfaction of the quiet industry, the affluence, and the general prosperity of the Chinese people; we endeavor to form an idea of the vast sums of money which have been appropriated for purposes of defence and general improvement; we calculate the cost of the Great Wall, of the Imperial Canal, of the countless water-courses for irrigation and drainage, of the numberless bridges, of the massive temples, of the lofty and expensive pagodas, which all over the country lift their summits high toward the clouds; their palaces, their public buildings, their enormous tombs,

rise before us as evidences of wealth and magnificence. Where, we ask the observer of to-day, where now are all these evidences of grandeur and affluence? Where is the China described by early travelers? It is not to be found. That China is no more. Shall we say these early travelers were deceived-that they have given us overdrawn pictures of the country; that their gorgeous descriptions of China never had any corresponding reality in the empire which they describe? We may not thus impeach the character of these earlier visitors to China. It is true, they tell us much that they heard, and we do not believe it; but they also tell us much that they saw, and we should not deny it.

China has changed, greatly changed, since their day; but yet sufficient remains of her former magnificence are still before us to justify and render credible their enthusiastic descriptions. The Great Wall, stretching for more than fifteen hundred

miles across the northern frontier, neglected and falling to decay, still presents its ruins as a proof of former greatness. The Grand Canal, now the scene of civil war, shows its ruins still to the traveler. The canals and water-courses, sadly neglected; the pagodas tottering to ruin; the palaces deserted; the temples abandoned and falling to decay; the bridges broken and many of them useless; the fortifications abandoned and crumbling to the ground; the tombs unswept and neglected, are all here, here in ruins,―here clothed in mourning, here wearing the aspect of desolation and decay,-here, as crumbling monuments of Chinese wealth and magnificence, here as sad evidences of the merciless and ruinous influences of the foreigner's avarice.

Besides all these evidences of former wealth, industry and prosperity, we know sufficient cause for the present evidences of impoverishment. We know that more than half a billion of dollars have been abstracted from the country, for which no equivalent but a poisonous drug has been returned. We know that the mines of China, which must originally have ranked among the richest in the world, have been exhausted to supply the waste of this drainage, and that the government has actually been engaged in making surveys to discover new ones. We know that

more than one hundred and fifteen millions of pounds of opium have been consumed by the victimized subjects of China within the past half-century, and which has been working disease and death among millions of Chinese, thus producing another source of impoverishment, by unfitting millions of besotted opium smokers for the performance of the duties of life. We know that millions of dollars more have been expended in efforts to suppress the abominable traffic, and in conducting a three years' war, and in paying an enormous and unjust indemnity occasioned by this illicit trade. Whatever China may once have been, now she everywhere exhibits painful evidences of poverty and decay. While we cannot mourn over some of the results of this impoverishment-such as the abandonment of her idolatrous temples, which in many places are crumbling to ruin; the neglect of her magnificent festivals, and the desertion of the idolatrous ceremonies at the tombs of the dead, which are left neglected and over

grown with weeds-we cannot but look upon them as sad evidences of a breaking empire. But we may mourn over abandoned defences, forts in ruins, walls falling to decay, bridges that are impassable, canals no longer navigable, cities deserted, commerce in confusion, merchants in bankruptcy, broken traders committing suicide, families in filth and rags, a country in civil war, an empire on the eve of dismemberment; and confident of the truth of our picture, we call upon the guilty trafficker in the pernicious drug to look upon his work.

Another important result arising from this trade may be thus stated in the language of the Canton Circular for 1846 :—

"With respect to the opium trade, as at present conducted, it is certainly a great evil, and indirectly injures the sale of other merchandise. One of the most prominent effects of this traffic, so intensely hated by the government and the vast majority of the people, is the jealousy and prejudice which it produces in the Chinese mind against all commercial intercourse with foreigners. It not only, as we have seen, strips them of all their resources, but it destroys all desire upon their part to improve their circumstances, and effectually deters them from entering into extensive and free intercourse with foreign traders. The Chinese, as the foreign trade is now conducted, can only look upon it as a losing system, in which all is loss to them, and all gain to the foreigner. They can only view the foreign trader as the enemy of their country, as the unprincipled dealer in a pernicious drug, who, for gain, will sacrifice the nation that consents to trade with him. They can only look upon the foreigner with a jealous and suspicious eye, as plotting the ruin and subjugation of their country, and who in China has not seen that jealous eye?"

We do not believe that the Chinese are inimical to an extensive foreign trade; on the contrary, they have given many evidences, not only of willingness but of anxiety to engage in traffic with foreigners, and had not the extensive evil influence of the trade in this drug been felt throughout the country, we have reason to believe that China would have proved one of the best markets in the world for the sale of European and American products. The Tartar government is usually considered anti-commercial. The reason is obvious. The Manchus are themselves foreigners, who by the power of their arms subjugated the empire of China, and who only hold their sovereignty over these millions of people by a feeble power. That the usurpers of these vast dominions should look with fear and jealousy