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outset of the opium campaign in China to suggest that India should cut off her supplies of opium from Indo-China, the British Possessions in the Far East, etc. That was quite true, and the reason was obvious. The opium campaign in China was a vast undertaking, and until it had proved suc- cessful it would have been premature and indeed hopeless to deal with the subsidiary question. But as soon as the British Government was satisfied that China had carried out her part of the pro- gramme and when the Chinese Government gave further evidence of its sincerity by destroying all the Indian opium that remained in China, Sir John Jordan had felt that the moment had come when, if the reform was to be successful all round, the export of opium for the consumption of overseas Chinese should likewise be stopped, and he had lost no time in making an urgent and earnest appeal in this sense, which, to his great regret, was not favourably entertained.
Mr. Campbell had thought this an extraordinary proposition, Sir John Jordan saw nothing extraordinary about it. What did seem to him extraordinary was that the Indian or any other Government should have expected China to continue to make a reform which entailed such a loss of revenue and required such sustained self-denial effective in practice, while Western countries maintained opium monopolies in leased territories which formed an integral part of the dominions and financed their own possessions adjacent thereto largely from the opium imported for con- sumption by Chinese settlers. Opium agreements notwithstanding, this, added to morphia and opium smuggling, was putting too great a strain upon human nature.
The meeting was brought to a close at 8 p.m.
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