friends, when they talk about opium, what they suppose to be the ordinary food of the people of India. The almost universal answer, perhaps with an air of displeasure that they should be asked such a foolish question, is that of course it is rice. I believe that nine tenths of the educated men and women of this country believe this to be true. V/hen they have not learned such an elementary fact as this, that throughout the greater part of India rice is no more the ordinary food of the people than it is in England, how can we be surprised if they do not know the truth about opium? We who have spent our lives in India are not all fools or impostors. When I hear the Government of India charged with the abominable wickedness of poisoning its own subjects, and millions of Chinese also, for the sake of filthy lucre, there is only one reason that prevents me from being filled with indignation, and that is that I know that these charges are the offspring of ignorance alone. Unfortunately, this does not make them less serious, for, of all enemies to human progress, ignorance is the most formidable, and is especially formidable when, as in this present case, it is combined with honest enthusiasm and an anxious desire for what is right."
The commission, having finished its investigations in England, visited India, and there renewed them in nearly every place of importance for obtaining information. It examined seven hundred and twenty-three witnesses, of whom four hundred and sixty-six were natives of India or China, including government officials, planters, landowners, traders, members of the professional classes, especially physicians, missionaries of nearly every denomination, military officers and private soldiers, and the chiefs and officials of the native states.
As a result of this elaborate inquiry, the commission, by a majority of eight to one, pronounced clearly and unhesitatingly in favor of the maintenance of the existing system of opium production and sale of opium in India; finding no evidence of extensive moral or physical demoralization arising in India from the use of the drug, or of any desire on the part of its people or of the Chinese Government to prohibit it.
The commission also decided, in respect to the effect on the finances of India of a prohibition of the sale and export of opium, that, "taking into consideration the compensation payable, cost of the necessary preventive measures, and the loss of revenue that would result from a policy of prohibition, the finances of India are not in a condition to bear the losses that such a policy would entail."
The testimony of the missionaries in India before the commission was not unanimous. That of the members of the American Methodist Episcopal and Canadian Presbyterian commissions.
