CO129-351 - Public Offices - 1908 — Page 278

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Inclosure 1 in No. 1.

Consul-General Sir P. Warren to Sir J. Jordan,

(No. 18.) Sir,

Shanghae, February 12, 1908. I HAVE the honour to acknowledge the receipt of your despatch No. 8 of the 27th ultimo, forwarding to me, for my observations, a pamphlet which you had "Another Opium War," by Mr. Marshall received from the Foreign Office, intitled Broomhall.

The author of the pamphlet appears to me to have been carried away in writing it by his feelings of indignation at what must seem to him, no doubt, the lukewarm attitude of the Shanghae Municipal Council towards the opium question.

He commences, on p. 4, his indictment of its policy with the following

sentence :-

"To the shame and humiliation of the British people, the Municipal Council of Shanghae is now availing itself of its exterritorial rights to defend a vice which the British House of Commons has twice declared to be morally indefensible, and--for so it appears to the writer and many others-to make null and void the pledge of Mr. John Morley, and to defy definite Government instructions.”

The Shanghae Municipal Council is composed of gentlemen, not only of British, but of American and German nationality, all of whom I know to be men of high character, and imbued with a strong sense of the duties of their position. As far as I am aware, they are none of them in any way interested in the opium trade, the extinction of which, by the fillip which it would give to trade in other commodities, could only be beneficial to them as business men. I find it difficult, therefore, to understand on what foundation Mr. Broomhall bases his charge that they defend the vice, for, on the contrary, I have every reason to believe that they, one and all, regard the opium habit with the utmost detestation. Again, when he accuses the Council of availing itself of its exterritorial rights to make null and void the pledge given by Mr. Morley, and to defy definite Government instructions, Mr. Broomball appears to have forgotten that the foreign Settlement at Shanghae is not a British, but an international Settlement, for the policy of which Mr. Morley can have given no pledge, since, strictly speaking, His Majesty's Government has no more authority to dictate to the Council elected by the ratepayers what this policy should be than the Government of any other Treaty Power. This mistake of his, which is no doubt unintentional, puts the action of the Council in a far worse light than it merits, and is unfortunate, for this reason; that when the document comes to be translated into the native papers or missionary journals, as such tracts usually are, by conveying to Chinese readers a totally wrong idea of the real facts of the case, it may do serious injury to British prestige, and undo to a great extent the good impression that the action of His Majesty's Government has created in this

country.

The policy of the Council is summarized very clearly in the following telegram from the Times" correspondent at Shanghae quoted in the pamphlet :--

"The Shanghae Municipal Council announces, in reference to the opium policy, that, at the request of the British Government, it has already ceased to issue fresh licences, and will restrict renewals gradually, with a view to their complete cessation, simultaneously with the complete suppression of the opium trade throughout the empire, by the end of ten years."

In justice to the members of the Council it should be stated that, if, in failing to close the opium dens in the Settlement before being approached by the Chinese authorities, they disregarded the views of His Majesty's Government, they had very excellent reasons for doing so. It is not usual for the Council to ignore the express Its members have been accused in the past of wishes of His Majesty's Government. being too subservient to these wishes, and if, on this occasion, they paid no regard to them, it was not done lightly, nor without a keen sense of the responsibility which they were assuming. The considerations which guided them are carefully set forth in the He points out that the revenue of the Chairman's letter to me of the 18th October. municipality is fixed for each year in advance at the annual meeting of ratepayers, and no alteration, therefore, of the schedule is legally possible until the next such meeting in March 1908. I should explain that the licences for the opium dens are issued for a period of twelve months, and the revenue they bring in amounts to no less than

Apart, therefore, from the legality or otherwise of this step, $5,000 taels per annum. the cancellation of these licences before expiry and the closing of the dens would have involved so serious a disturbance of the municipal finances, and would have constituted such a grave breach of faith towards the proprietors of the establishments, that, if any consideration at all was to be paid to the interests of the ratepayers and to the good name of the Council, it was impossible for the Committee to pursue any other course.

It is evidently, however, Mr. Broomhall's opinion that neither the above nor any other considerations should have been allowed by the Council to weigh with it as against its moral obligation, as he considers it, to follow in the footsteps of the Shanghae City authorities and close the dens in the Settlement simultaneously with those in the native city, and he appears to think it inexcusable that its members should hold views of their own on the opium question in its bearings on the welfare of the Settlement, and particularly that these views should be influenced in any way by the financial aspect of the question.

As the elected representatives of a cosmopolitan community, of which the British section, although comprising a majority of qualified voters, constitutes barely one-third of the total foreign population, it is unquestionably the first duty of the Council to consider the interests of the ratepayers as a body, and not the wishes, if they happen to clash with these interests, of the Government of any single nationality amongst them. Mr. Broomhall loses sight, too, of the fact that the Shanghae community is a business community, and that its representatives are business inen, with whom sentimental considerations, when they conflict with their reasoned views, cannot be expected to weigh very seriously. Of the genuineness of their disbelief in the power of the Central Government to enforce the new opium Regulations I have no doubt whatever, and I may say that their scepticism on the point is shared by practically the whole of the foreign community of the port. As an excuse for them and for those who agree with them, I may perhaps quote that extract from an article in the "Times" of the 23rd November, 1906, which the author of the pamphlet cites with such evident approval. In it China's undertaking is acknowledged to be "so formidable that the strongest of Governments might flinch before it. If China performs it with even partial success she will have demonstrated that her rulers exercise a sway over the minds and consciences of her people such as no Western Government can claim, and such as Western people can hardly comprehend."

I can, moreover, thoroughly endorse the argument used by the Council as to the desirability of keeping houses in which opium is smoked under supervision by the police, as opium dens in the Settlement now are under the terms of their licences. The reason is that the criminal classes in China are as a rule opium smokers, and it is in the dens that most arrests are effected. In view of the great influx of criminals into the Settlement, and the consequent increase in crime which has resulted from the abolition of the bamboo at the Mixed Court, the loss of such an excellent means of keeping bad characters under observation might prove an extremely serious matter for the law-abiding population of Shanghae. As the Chairman mentions, the closing of the opium dens in the city of Shanghae and of Soochow has led to no apparent diminution in the sale or consumption of the drug in either town. He might, indeed, have laid more stress in his letter on the failure in this respect of the measure, on the benefits of which so much stress is laid by Mr. Broomhall. There is no reason to believe that the results in the Settlement will be different from those in Shanghae City and at Soochow. The consumption of the drug will still go on to the same extent in private houses, lodging-houses, native hotels, and other haunts over which the police can exercise no effective supervision, and the only persons to benefit by the change will be the retail dealers and the criminal population.

How far the terms of the Anti-Opium Edict, and especially of Article 4, which enjoins the closing of opium dens, have been obeyed in the provinces is a matter regarding which you are in a better position than myself to judge. One might infer from the pamphlet that it is only in the international Settlement at Shanghae and the French Settlement that its recommendations have not been promptly and effectively carried out, whereas it is well known that in many parts of the country the Edict has been completely ignored. Even at Soochow, as a missionary correspondent informs me, no serious attempt to enforce it has been made, the only difference between the present state of affairs and the old conditions being that what used to go on in the open is now going on surreptitiously. The state of things in the city of Shanghac is little, if any, better. The policy of the Council on the whole question will be submitted to the ratepayers for their approval at the annual general meeting to be held next month, and it is possible, though not, I fear, very probable, that it may then be modified in a manner which may

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