Indo-Chinese opium
trade, are vilifying their countrymen and blackening their country in the
eyes of the whole world, so that the foreigner can convict us out of our
own mouths, and gibe at us for hypocrisy and turpitude, which we are
wholly innocent of, and for crimes we have never committed."

But making every allowance for the loftiness of their motives and the
sincerity of their opinions, we must take grievous exception to some of
their methods of propagandism. Among the numerous pamphlets and tracts
published by the society is one called _Poppies: a Talk with Boys and
Girls_, of which the reviewer in the _Friend of China_[136] says himself:
"To acknowledge our sins and the sins of our fathers to ourselves, and in
the face of the world, is painful and humiliating enough; but to tell our
children that England is not the brave, generous, Christian country,
foremost of the nations in the cause of liberty and religion all the world
over, which we should like them to think her, but, on the contrary,
capable of the _meanness_, _hypocrisy_, _greed_, and _cruelty_ of our
treatment of China, is a bitter task." Bitter, indeed! and what if it be
wholly unjustifiable? There is no high-minded Englishman but will utterly
resent and protest against this poisoning of the minds of our children
with delusive and exaggerated statements, and thus prejudicing them on a
subject which they are not yet of an age to form a fair judgment about.

As to the meanness, hypocrisy, and the rest, we need not say more than we
have already said, but may notice in passing that unlimited abuse of
England's foreign policy seems, curiously enough, to be a guarantee with
some people of the speaker or writer's having the real interests of
England at heart; and a man needs only to stigmatize the national policy
with the added acrimony of alliteration as "cruel, cowardly, and
criminal,"[137] for him to pass for the purest of patriots.

And now, in conclusion, we are content to leave the issue of this
controversy to the judgment of our countrymen, feeling sure that, if
justice and right are on the side of the agitators, they will succeed; if
not, that the agitation will inevitably die a natural death: ever withal
remembering the maxim--

_Magna est veritas et prevalebit._

INDEX.

Alcock, Sir Rutherford, 4, 15, 129.

Anti-Opium Society, 5, 62, 136, 137.

Baring, Sir Evelyn, 60, 123 ff.

Brereton, _Truth about Opium_, 5, 57, 58, 68,