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like, before discharging what it appears must be the distasteful duty of criticism, to add a partly personal explanation. We met at Shanghai to discuss a problem towards the solution of which it might well have been thought that no common, yet effective, line of advance could be found; and in fact it did at one time appear that the commission's proceedings might terminate in irreconcilable division. That a settlement was arrived at is due to the relations of confidence and cordiality between the delegates and their common resolve not to lose an unprecendented opportunity for enforcing the view that the opium question required firmer handling. Holding this view themselves, and vested by their own Government with a practically unfettered discretion, the British delegates advanced far beyond the standpoint which the actual position of the opium question in British territories might have inclined them to adopt; while the American delegates on their part recognised, or were understood to recognise,* that a genuine and unanimous agreement among Powers representing so many phases of the opium question and varieties of political conditions could not be expected to go the whole length of the American policy of clear and unqualified prohibition. The settlement thus reached was no mere compromise, for it included a recommendation in favour of the universal abolition of the practice of opium-smoking and another resolution (covering the use of opium in other ways) which advocated that improvement and progressive strengthening of methods of control which are equally necessary whether the ultimate ideal is the prevention of abuse or abolition. It was reasonable, therefore, to suppose that every delegation had recognised the spirit of honest co-operation and mutual adjustment which had governed the action of the others, and was prepared to recommend the final proposals unreservedly to its own Government, it being understood, of course, that no Government was thereby invited, as regards its own territories, to refrain from adopting a more drastic policy if it preferred to do so.
3. Dr. Wright's narrative is seriously misleading on several important questions and inexact, incomplete, or actually incorrect in minor particulars, with the result that the findings of the commission have been represented to his Government as proceeding much beyond the limits actually reached, while an extraneous question has been needlessly introduced by Dr. Wright's insistent demand for the recognition not only of his own country's acknowledged priority in the inception of the commission, but of her precedence and initiative on the commission itself and her paramount interest in any future development of the opium problem. The methods which Dr. Wright has adopted must, I think, make any country hesitate in the future to 'commit its credit and its freedom of action to the chances of international debate; and though I do so with much reluctance and regret, I think that, on this broader ground as well as to assist in a more correct appreciation of the commission's views, it is justifiable and, indeed, necessary to subject Dr. Wright's statement to a close analysis.
4. I can only glance briefly at the incidental inaccuracies-individually perhaps I refer, hardly worth pressing, but not entirely negligible in their cumulative effect. first, for it is typical of Dr. Wright's entire report, to the sentence in which he purports to give the general effect of the findings of the Straits Settlements Opium Commission. All that Dr. Wright finds to say of their striking report is that it was "somewhat favourable to the continuance of the opium farm" (the abolition of which the commission had in fact recommended) and that by means of this farm "the Government disposed of opium and acquired a large revenue," a phrase which can hardly fail to convey the suggestion--repudiated by the commission--that the question of finance had been the determining factor in their deliberations.
5. As regards the Shanghai Commission, Dr. Wright asserts with reference to the question of its capacity to conduct a scientific investigation into anti-opium remedies, &c., that opposition was waived for the sake of harmony," but omits to state that the views which his delegation supported on this question had been already twice put to the vote and negatived. I may notice also his repeated adoption of loose popular phrases in stating the general effect of the commission's carefully worded and carefully guarded conclusions, as when he speaks of their "condemnation of the opium vice," or In the statement that "the opium question has been studied, discussed, and roundly condemned." In another place he hints not obscurely that the British delegation introduced a comparatively "weak" resolution on morphia (a judgment which that delegation would certainly not endorse for they held the strongest views on this
* Lc., by the withdrawal of many of their resolutions and their acceptance of alternatives, †This passage and others referred to in paragraphs 4 and ò are reproduced in Appendix 2 enclosed with this memorandum. Passages connected with more important questions are reproduced in Appendix 1.
It was with the object of making their draft as effective and practical as possible that the British delegates introduced into it the specific reference to the necessity for control over manufacture.
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question), but that it was toned up by American amendments (of which I may note that the commission's recorded proceedings contain no trace). In the same spirit, referring to the reductions in the Indian production and exportation of opium, he speaks of the "sincero effort" which is being made, a term which very inadequately acknowledges the large reductions already effected or the Indian Government's assured capacity to enforce any further reductions to which they may be committed. At the same time, as I have observed above, he presses, on behalf of his own Government, claims for pre-eminence, down to the smallest details, which somewhat strain the literal facts; as, for example, in the repeated assertion (apparently made on the strength of assistance privately given in the drafting) that resolution No. 9 (which the Chinese delegate introduced) was introduced by the American delegation; or in the similar statement that resolution No. 4 (which was moved by himself) was passed "in its original form," whereas it was twice verbally amended.
6. Above all, and to this is mainly due his gravely misleading treatment of the larger questions, he permits himself to make unqualified statements of fact for which no authority eau in the nature of the case be produced, as when he attributes opinions to the commission which they neither placed on record nor at any time collectively pronounced; and he fails in his report to bring out clearly the extent of the real difference of opinion which was disclosed in discussion, and to enforce the consequent lesson that the resolutions must be interpreted strictly as they stand, as expressing the utmost to which the representatives of the different Powers found themselves able to agree. On this subject the remarks of the president in vol. 1, p. 42, of the commission's proceedings are much in point. In illustrating these points, I may first take the question of further international intervention in the opium problem to which Dr. Wright's report leads up.
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7. In the first of the series of passages quoted in Extract (A) of Appendix 1, Dr. Wright points out, correctly enough, that if the commission had failed to arrive at a substantial degree of unanimity, the United States Government could not hopefully have presented "further proposals for international action." Expanding this last phrase, he states that, as things were, the way was left open to his Government to propose "further international co-operation for the placing of the production and traffic in opium under international law." This is also correct; the way to the submission of such proposals was perfectly open because the commission steadily refused to regard such questions as within their competence, and consequently neither arrived at nor recorded any opinion on the merits. Still keeping the idea of international jurisdiction over every aspect of the opium question in his mind, Dr. Wright proceeds (in the second passage quoted) by another transition to the proposition that---
Although no formal declaration was made as to further international action in regard to opium production, traffic, and misuse, it was nevertheless recoguised that such action was necessary before the Powers could congratulate themselves on having solved the problem that has loomed so large and so long in the Far East."
At this point Dr. Wright goes unmistakably beyond the ascertainable facts and directly contrary to all reasonable presumption. Though the resolutions of the commission may, as regards certain specific points and at some suitable time, involve international action, the larger conception of what, for convenience, I have called "international jurisdiction" is completely absent from them, and if it appeared in their discussions it was only mentioned to be dismissed. In replacing the American delegation's resolution on the subject of morphia by an alternative draft the commission omitted the reference to the desirability of "strict international agreements." Another American resolution, stating "that no Government represented may, by its national laws, wholly solve its own opium problem without the joint aid of those Governments concerned in the production and manufacture of opium," was opposed, and was ultimately withdrawn. Yet another American resolution, declaring "that the commission as a whole record its sense in favour of the principle of an international conference for the solution of the problem," was similarly opposed and withdrawn. In none of these cases did the American delegation venture to put its views to the vote. The American and Chinese delegates also raised the treaty question, but, on the question of the commission's competence to discuss this matter being put to the vote, found only a single supporter (Germany). The reluctance of the commission to make themselves parties to proposals for international interference, even in a special and definite case, was indeed so strong that the British delegation felt compelled to withdraw a resolution suggesting that international advice should be proffered to China with a view to the initiation of more systematic methods of dealing with the question of opium production
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