As the opium agreement concluded between Lord Salisbury and the Marquis Tsing on the 18th July last is attracting the notice of the local public press, I bey permission to make some remarks on the subject through the columns of your influ ential journal, premising however that a somewhat lengthy recapitulation of all the circumstances connected with the taxation on opium from the period of the trade in it being legalized in 1858, till the present time, will be needed to thoroughly appre+ ciate the important disadvantage of the arrangement now assented to by Her Ma+ jooty's Covernmont, In the report on the revision of the Tariff, drawn up by Messrs, Olyphant and Slade' after their interviews at Shanghai with the representatives of the Imperial Chinese Commissioners, in pursuance of the Treaty of Tientsin, the initiatory steps taken towards settling the duty to which opium would be liable under the treaty regulations are carefully described. In the Treaty of Tientsin itself the opium trade has been entirely ignored, and. as Hisich, the Chinese Superintendent of Customs at Shanghai, pointed out in the discussion on the trade regulations legalising the. trafic in it, opium waa" nob an article within the cognizance of the Treaty when it was signed. It was therefore urged by the Chinese represcutative that we should not seek to Taqulate the duty now to be imposed upon it by the 5 RVI and that we should not apply to per cent. ad valorem principle under Art. it the privilege of Art, XXVIII, under which it would be clear of all goods in transit exceeding 24 per cent. ad valorem; nor the privilege of Art. IX, under which the foreigner with a passport would be at liberty to carry his own opium; and that the duty upon it was not to be included in the general tariff, but was to be the subject of a separate declaration, relieving the trade of its interdict; and he added that the Guty should be made as moderate as possible. The Chinese having been asked to state what duty they proposed to place on the drug, declined naming the amount of duty to be levied until a statement was made by the British deputies of what would be considered a reasonable duty on their side. They were informed that according to the data before Lord Elgin, duty of from 15 to 20 taels per chest would
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.