CO129-373 - Public Offices - 1910 — Page 525

[This Document is the Property of His Britannic Majesty's Government.]

OPIUM.

CONFIDENTIAL.

[42126]

C O 39115

[November 19.]

TECR

SECTION 1.

Rrot 23 FC 10

No. 1.

Sir,

India Office to Foreign Office.-(Received November 19.)

India Office, November 18, 1910. I AM directed by the Secretary of State for India in Council to forward copies of a paper containing observations by Mr. J. B. Brunyate, C.LE., Indian representative at the International Opium Commission at Shanghai, on Dr. Hamilton Wright's report regarding that commission and its results, and to suggest that it might with advantage be communicated to the British Ambassador at Washington, for Dr. Wright's report the information of the Government of the United States.

"the International Opium Commission and its referred to is the section hended results," which forms the concluding portion of a communication addressed by him to the American Secretary of State on the 1st January, 1910, reproduced on pp. 62-75 of the United States Government official paper "Senate--61st Congress, 2nd session, document No. 377.'

Mr. Brunyate has submitted the following remarks in explanation of the criticisms made by him--

"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 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 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.'

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The enclosed paper seems to show that the report of Dr. Wright is not altogether in harmony with this expectation, and that while it is inexact in various particulars, it has a tendency to represent the findings of the commission (which were considered and expressed with great precision) as proceeding much beyond the limits actually

I am, reached.

&c.

ED. MONTAGE.

* Printed elsewhere.

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