ed before a Committee of this House that not less than four millions
of pounds of tobacco have lately been smuggled into Ireland. And all
this, observe, has been done in spite of the most efficient preventive
service that I believe ever existed in the world. Consider too that the
price of an ounce of opium is far, very far higher than the price of a
pound of tobacco. Knowing this, knowing that the whole power of King,
Lords, and Commons cannot here put a stop to a traffic less easy, and
less profitable than the traffic in opium, can you believe that an
order prohibiting the traffic in opium would have been readily obeyed?
Remember by what powerful motives both the buyer and the seller would
have been impelled to deal with each other. The buyer would have been
driven to the seller by something little short of torture, by a physical
craving as fierce and impatient as any to which our race is subject.
For, when stimulants of this sort have been long used, they are desired
with a rage which resembles the rage of hunger. The seller would have
been driven to the buyer by the hope of vast and rapid gain. And do
you imagine that the intense appetite on one side for what had become a
necessary of life, and on the other for riches, would have been appeased
by a few lines signed Charles Elliot? The very utmost effect which it
is possible to believe that such an order would have produced would
have been this, that the opium trade would have left Canton, where the
dealers were under the eye of the Superintendent, and where they would
have run some risk of being punished by him, and would have spread
itself along the coast. If we know anything about the Chinese
Government, we know this, that its coastguard is neither trusty nor
efficient; and we know that a coastguard as trusty and efficient as
our own would not be able to cut off communication between the merchant
longing for silver and the smoker longing for his pipe. Whole fleets
of vessels would have managed to land their cargoes along the shore.
Conflicts would have arisen between our countrymen and the local
magistrates, who would not, like the authorities of Canton, have
had some knowledge of European habits and feelings. The mere malum
prohibitum would, as usual, have produced the mala in se. The unlawful
traffic would inevitably have led to a crowd of acts, not only unlawful,
but immoral. The smuggler would, by the almost irresistible force of
circumstances, have been turned i