officers and subjects."

It will be interesting before we consider the opium war and its immense
significance in history, to glance over the attitude of the company and
later of its successor, the government, towards the whole miserable
business. The company's board of directors, in 1817, had sent this
dispatch from Calcutta in answer to a question, "Were it possible to
prevent the using of the drug altogether, except strictly for the purpose
of medicine, we would gladly do it in compassion to mankind."

It would be pleasant to believe that the East India Company was sincere in
this ineffective if well-phrased expression of "compassion." The spectacle
of a great corporation in any century giving up a lucrative traffic on
merely human and moral grounds would be illuminating and uplifting. But
unfortunate business corporations are, in their very nature, slaves of the
balance sheet, organized representatives of the mighty laws of trade. I
have already quoted enough evidence to show that the company was not only
awake to the dangers of opium, but that it had deliberately and
painstakingly worked up the traffic. Had there been, then, a change of
heart in the directorate? I fear not. Among the East Indian
correspondence of 1830, this word from the company's governor-general came
to light: "We are taking measures for extending the cultivation of the
poppy, with a view to a larger increase in the supply of opium." And in
this same year, 1830, a House of Commons committee reported that "The
trade, which is altogether contraband, has been largely extended of late
years."

G. H. M. Batten, a formal official of the Indian Civil Service, who
contributed the chapter on opium in Sir John Strachey's work on "India,
its Administration and Progress," has been regarded of late years as one
of the ablest defenders of the whole opium policy. He believes that "The
daily use of opium in moderation is not only harmless but of positive
benefit, and frequently even a necessity of life." This man, seeing little
but good in opium, doubts "if it ever entered into the conception of the
court of directors to suppress in the interests of morality the
cultivation of the poppy."

Perhaps the most striking testimony bearing against the policy of the
company was that given by Robert Inglis, of Canton, a partner in the large
opium-trading firm of Dent & Co., to the Select Committee on China Trade
(House of Commons, 1840). Here it is:

Mr. Inglis.--"I