CO129-372 - Public Offices - 1910 — Page 583

Carsidential

Sharma 4.10.8 agander

GOVERNMENT OF INDIA FINANCE DEPARTMENT. Enclosures to Despatch No./93 of 1960

579

Rrap

MEMORANDUM.

At the request of the Government of India I record my impressions on the report on the International Opium Commission at Shanghai which has been sub- mitted to the United States Government by Dr. Hamilton, Wright, a representa tive of that Government on the Commission. The report referred to is the section headed "The International Opium Commission and its results" which forms the concluding portion of a communication dated the 1st January 1910 from Dr. Hamilton Wright to the American Secretary of State, and is repro- duced on pages 62-75 of the United States Government official paper "Senate- 61st Congress, 2nd Session, Document No. 377 ".

2. The tone of Dr. Wright's narrative departs so unexpectedly and so widely from the spirit which animated our discussions and findings at Shanghai that I should 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 termin- ate in irreconcileable 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 unprecedented 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 unfet tered 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 recognized, or were understood to recognize,* that a genuine and unani- mous 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 recom- mendation in favour of the universal abolition of the practice of opium smok- ing 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 recognized the spirit of honest co-operation and mutual adjust- mont which had governed the action of the others, and was prepared to recom- mend the final proposals unreservedly to its own Government, it being under stood 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 extraucous question has been needlessly introduced by Dr. Wright's insistent demand for the recognition not only of his own country's ac- knowledged priority in the inception of the Commission but of her preced- ence 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 statements to a close analysis.

4. I can only glance briefly at the incidental inaccuracies-individually perhaps hardly worth pressing but not entirely negligible in their cumulative effect. I refer, first, for it is typical of Dr. Wright's entire report, to the

i... by the withdrawal of many of their resolutions and their acceptance of alternatives.