ifficult to get a commodity into these currents, but once
you have got the commodity in, you will find it next to impossible to get
it out. There has been more than one prime minister, I fancy, more than
one secretary of state for India, who has wished the opium question in
Jericho. It is not pleasant to answer the moral indignation of the British
empire with the cynical statement that the India government cannot exist
without that opium revenue. Why, oh, why, did not the great Warren
Hastings develop the cotton rather than the opium industry! But the
interesting fact is that he did not. He chose opium, and opium it is.

The India Government Opium Monopoly is an import factor in this
extraordinary story of a debauchery of a third of the human race by the
most nearly Christian among Christian nations. We must understand what it
is and how it works before we can understand the narrative of that greed,
with its attendant smuggling, bribery and bloodshed which has brought the
Chinese empire to its knees. In speaking of it as a "monopoly," I am not
employing a cant word for effect. I am not making a case. That is what it
is officially styled in a certain blue book on my table which bears the
title, "Statement Exhibiting the Moral and Material Progress of India
during the year 1905-6," and which was ordered by the House of Commons, to
be printed, May 10th, 1907.

It is easy, with or without evidence, to charge a great corporation or a
great government with inhuman crimes. If the charge be unjust it is
difficult for the corporation or the government to set itself right before
the people. Six truths cannot overtake one lie. That is why, in this day
of popular rule, the really irresponsible power that makes and unmakes
history lies in the hands of the journalist. As the charge I am bringing
is so serious as to be almost unthinkable, and as I wish to leave no
loophole for the counter-charge that I am colouring this statement, I
think I can do no better than to lift my description of the Opium Monopoly
bodily from that rather ponderous blue book.

There is nothing new in this charge, nothing new in the condition which
invites it. It is rather a commonplace old condition. Millions of men, for
more than a hundred years, have taken it for granted, just as men once
took piracy for granted, just as men once took the African slave-trade for
granted, just as men to-day take the highly organized traffic in
unfortunate women and girls for