Trade or Opium ?
New York Daily Tribune
September 20, 1858
by
Karl Marx
THE NEWS of the new treaty wrung from China by the allied Plenipotentiaries
has, it would appear, conjured up the same wild vistas of an immense
extension of trade which danced before the eyes of the commercial mind
in 1845, after the conclusion of the first Chinese war. Supposing
the Petersburg wires to have spoken truth, is it quite certain that an
increase of the Chinese trade must follow upon the multiplication of its
emporiums ? Is there any probability that the war Of 1857-8 will lead
to more splendid results than the war of 1839-42? So much is certain
that the Treaty Of 1842, instead of increasing American and English exports
to China, proved instrumental only in precipitating and aggravating the
commercial crisis of 1847. In a similar way, by raising dreams of
an inexhaustible market and by fostering false speculations, the present
treaty may help preparing a new crisis at the very moment when the market
of the world is but slowly recovering from the recent universal shock.
Besides its negative result, the first opium-war succeeded in stimulating
the opium trade at the expense of legitimate commerce, and so will this
second opium-war do if England be not forced by the general pressure
of the civilized world to abandon the compulsory opium cultivation in India
and the armed opium propaganda to China. We forbear dwelling on the
morality of that trade, described by Montgomery Martin, himself an Englishman,
in the following terms:
"Why, the 'slave trade' was merciful compared
with the 'opium trade'. We did not destroy the bodies of the Africans,
for it was our immediate interest to keep them alive; we did not debase
their natures, cormpt their minds, nor destroy their souls. But the
opium seller slays the body after he has corrupted, degraded and annihilated
the moral being of unhappy sinners, while, every hour is bringing new victims
to a Moloch which knows no satiety, and where the English murderer and
Chinese suicide vie with each other in offerings at his shrine."
The Chinese cannot take both goods and drug; under actual circumstances,
extension of the Chinese trade resolves into extension of the opium trade;
the growth of the latter is incompatible with the development of legitimate
commercethese propositions were pretty generally admitted two years ago.
A Committee of the House of Commons, appointed in 1847 to take into consideration
the state of British commercial intercourse with China, reported thus:
"We regret "that the trade with that country
has been for some time in a very unsatisfactory condition, and that the
result of our extended intercourse has by no means realized the just expectations
which had naturally been founded on afreer access to so magnificent a market....
We find that the difficulties of the trade do not arise from any want of
demand in China for articles of British manufacture or from the increasing
competition of other nations.... The payment for opium ... absorbs the
silver to the great inconvenience of the general traffic of the Chinese;
and tea and silk must in fact absorb the rest."
The Friend of China, Of July 28, I 849, generalizing the same proposition,
says in set terms:
"The opium trade progresses steadily.
The increased consumption of teas and silk in Great Britain and the United
States would merely result in the increase of the opium trade; the case
of the manufacturers is hopeless."
One of the leading American merchants in China reduced, in an article
inserted in Hunt's Merchants' Magazine, for January, 1850, the whole question
of the trade with China to this point: "Which branch of commerce
is to be suppressed, the opium trade or the export trade of American or
English produce?" The Chinese themselves took exactly the same view
of the case. Montgomery Martin narrates: "I inquired of the Taoutai
at Shanghai which would be the best means of increasing our commerce
with China, and his first answer to me, in the presence of Capt. Balfour,
Her Majesty's Consul, was: 'Cease to send us so much opium, and we will
be able to take your manufactures.'"
The history of general commerce during the last eight years has, in
a new and striking manner, illustrated these positions; but, before analysing
the deleterious effects on legitimate commerce of the opium trade, we propose
giving a short review of the rise and progress of that stupendous traffic
which, whether we regard the tragical collisions forming, so to say, the
axis round which it turns, or the effects produced by it on the general
relations of the Eastern and Western worlds, stands solitary on record
in the annals of mankind. Previous to 1767 the quantity of opium exported
from India did not exceed 200 chests, the chest weighing about 133lbs.
Opium was legally admitted in China on the payment of a duty of about $3
per chest, as a medicine; the Portuguese, who brought it from Turkey, being
its almost exclusive importers into the Celestial Empire. In I773,
Colonel Watson and Vice-President Wheeler -- persons deserving to take
a place among the Hermentiers, Palmers and other poisoners of world-wide
fame -- suggested to the East India Company the idea of entering upon the
opium traffic with China. Consequently, there was established a depot for
opium in vessels anchored in a bay to the southwest of Macao. The
speculation proved a failure. In 1781 the Bengal Government sent
an armed vessel, laden with opium, to China; and, in I794, the Company
stationed a large opium vessel at Whampoa, the anchorage for the port of
Canton. It seems that Whampoa proved a more convenient depot than
Macao, because, only two years after its selection, the Chinese Government
found it necessary to pass a law which threatened Chinese smugglers of
opium to be beaten with a bamboo and exposed in the streets with wooden
collars around their necks. About 1798, the East India Company ceased
to be direct exporters of opium, but they became its producers. The
opium monopoly was established in India; while the Company's own ships
were hypocritically forbidden from trafficking in the drug, the licences
it granted for private ships trading to China containing a provision which
attached a penalty to them if freighted with opium of other than the Company's
own make. In 1800, the import into China had reached the number of
2,000 chests. Having, during the eighteenth century, borne the aspect
common to all feuds between the foreign merchant and the national custom-house,
the struggle between the East India Company and the Celestial Empire assumed,
since the beginning of the nineteenth century, features quite distinct
and
exceptional; while the Chinese Emperor, in order to check the suicide
of his people, prohibited at once the import of the poison by the foreigner,
and its consumption by the natives, the East India Company was rapidly
converting the cultivation of opium in India, and its contraband sale to
China, into internal parts of its own financial system.
While the semi-barbarian stood on the principle of morality, the civilized
opposed to him the principle of self. That a giant empire, containing
almost one-third of the human race, vegetating in the teeth of time, insulated
by the forced exclusion of general intercourse, and thus contriving
to dupe itself with delusions of Celestial perfection-that such an empire
should at last be overtaken by fate on the occasion of a deadly duel,
in which the representative of the antiquated world appears prompted by
ethical motives, while the representative of overwhelming modern society
fights for the privilege of buying in the cheapest and selling in the dearest
markets-this, indeed, is a sort of tragical couplet stranger than any poet
would ever have dared to fancy.