So far from the Indian Government having rendered itself obnoxious to the charge of having deliberately fostered the growth and cultivation of opium within its territories, it may be stated as a fact that its action has been the reverse, Had the Indian Government been a private speculator interested in the opium trade with China, its conduct might best described as suicidal. It has in fact been engaged in a process of starving and raising the charges, and this in the face of a competition growing year by year. There is no doubt that had the Indian Executive listened to the advice given it by those more interested in the opium trade, it might by this time have gained a practical monopoly, so strong, indeed, that the Chinese Government would have been helpless in any contest. Influenced, however, by the outery against the opium trade, it has discouraged the cultivation in Bengal and checked by inorensed transit daties the export of the drag from the native States. The result has been carious. While the import into China has only increased some ight to ten per cent. daring the last ten years, the increase of revenue derived by the Indian Government hag been more than doubled. The artificial scarcity induced at Calcutta has enabled the Government not only to sell its own drug at continually enhanced prices, but has left it a wide margin to add on transit duties on the native drug passing to Bombay, with the result of a great temporary inflation in the finances of the peninsula, Another result has followed, not, we believe, altogether unforeseen by the financiers of India, though certainly not quite in accordance with the views'of the anti-opiam agitators. The artificial famine in Tudia has, as any reasonable economist could have predicted, induced an extension of the cultivation of the poppy in China. It seems undeniable that India can grow opium at a greatly more advantageous rate than China; the experience of the opium merchant at least goes to prove thab where the two meet together on anything like equal terms the imported article drives the native out of the market, Still when we find that a crop in 1878, the greater portion of which went to China, and whose value in the Chinese ports we may put down at about forty millions of Haikwan taels, actually paid to the Indien.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.