All about opium / edited by Hartmann Henry Sultzberger.

Date:
1884
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: All about opium / edited by Hartmann Henry Sultzberger. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    48/230 (page 28)
    Two meetings have already taken place, one at the Mansion House in October, under the presidency of the Lord Mayor, at which the Archbishop of Canterbury and Cardinal Manning were the chief speakers and supporters of tlie resolutions ; and another subsequently at Sheffield, with the Archbishop of York in the chair. An influential deputation to the Prime Minister, and an organised agitation to back it, are further calculated to excite considerable interest, and to rouse public attention to a subject of national importance. I wish to speak with all respect of the high dignitaries, civil and clerical, who have given their names in aid of this movement. They are great authorities in their own spheres, and, as no one doubts their good faith or good intentions, there is a natural reluctance to question the wisdom of their acts. Nevertheless, in such a discussion as they have actively promoted, concerning the opium trade, its history, con- ditions, and influences, it is scarcely a disparagement to say that they cannot be supposed to have any great knowledge of the subject. It is .one which cannot be mastered by a few hours’ study, and when they give circulation, in their speeches, to exaggerations of the most mis- chievous and misleading character, it must be assumed that they speak from the briefs furnished them by others. But they cannot on that account be entirely acquitted of responsibility for the truth of the statements to which they lend their names. And I may say here, that although most of the staple arguments and misleading opinions on opium and its disastrous effects come from the missionaries in China, whose good faith I do not question,—there is no stronger protest against exaggerated and sensational statements on record, than has been supplied by one of their number, the late Dr. Medliurst, of whom it has been truly said he was “ one of the most able, experienced, and zealous missionaries in China.” Opposed in principle to the opium trade in all its aspects, his statements will be readily accepted as unimpeachable evidence. The following remark occurs in an official paper for-warded to the Chief Superintendent of Trade at Hong Kong in 1855.* Alluding to a speech of an American missionary, who had visited England, and was reported to have told the British public “ that the smokers of the contraband article have increased from eight to fifteen millions, yielding an annual death harvest of more than a million,” and further characterising the traffic as “ stain- ing the British name in China with the deepest disgrace,” Dr. Medhurst observes : “ Such statements do great harm ; they produce a fictitious and groundless excitement in the mind of the religious and philan- thropic public at home, while they steel, against all reasonable and moderate representations, the minds of the political and mercantile body abroad. The estimate given has not even the semblance of truth ; it is an outrageous exaggeration.’’f * See Papers relating to the Opium Trade in China, 1842-1856, presented to the House of Lords. f Dr. Medhurst comments strongly, in the same paper, on the American missionary’s exaggeration in attributing all the sin and disgrace exclusively to the British, observing “ that missionaries know, or ought to have kuown, that American citizens are fully as much implicated in this affair in China as the subjects of Great Britain. There are individual exceptions among the merchants of both nations, but on the whole both English and American houses in China trade in the drug, each to the full extent of their means.” To the fame effect is the following, in a despatch to Lord Clarendon,