CO129-080 - Sir Robinson - 1861 [1-3] — Page 544

Leao, at least, would still be in demand, and could be obtained only against silver — an exchange of which financiers call the utter impossibility, when the actual proportion of gold and silver in Europe is taken into consideration.

4. Not having a market for its main trade produce and chief Revenue, India falls into trouble, and the reaction is immediately felt at home.

I am so certain of what I advance that I'll at once clear up the position. The people of Hongkong, Canton suspect the counterfeiting of opium — they are silent, because they have no proofs. I am watched. Now if they are to send to Hongkong a lever of drug for examination, it's history and my name would soon be in the "Daily Press" and the overland sheets would soon repeat the thing, and the funds in England would fall at once; for the financiers in Europe know that the prosperity of India, and therefore the mercantile and political supremacy of England in the Indian and Pacific Oceans hangs upon that most slender thread, "the Open Question of Opium".

But this is a digression; I return to my subject.

5. Any circumstance that would, in a given time, say in three years, spatially, or in toto, or even partially, annihilate the growth of Opium in India, or even of the production, would therefore deeply wound British interests.

I have said that I wished for wealth and political influence. To effect what I have resumed in the five preceding paragraphs would undoubtedly give me the second; anywhere on the Continent of Europe. As to the first, I had made up my mind to obtain it at once, without following any further labor or in any tedious manner.

I must preface this portion of my communication with a remark without which I could not make myself well understood. For years, I have passed nearly five in Mongolia and Manchuria in constant intercourse with the traders and military posts, tributaries of the Amoor. I traded, or smuggled, as you please, Patna Opium, which my agents forwarded to me by Yankee whalers and by my own ships, and which I sold at prices varying from $260 to $3000 per chest.

As a chemist and a botanist, and I thought even at that time that I could extract all the components of Opium from various plants more commonly found than poppy is. Later, in Paris, I analyzed the components known in Opium; I sought the alkaloids at other sources.