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.