CO129-426 - Public Offices - 1915 — Page 373

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now to inform China that they are prepared at once to release her from all further obligation to admit Indian opium, in full confidence that she will complete the task that she has so well begun.

4. As regards the Shanghai Opium Shops.-The board desires to express its satisfaction with Sir John Jordan's remonstrances with the Municipal Council, made under instructions from the Foreign Office. It would draw your attention to the following points :-

(a.) The total failure of the Shanghai Municipal Council to act up to the expression by its chairman, Mr. Keswick, in January 1907, addressed to the senior consul, of "sincere sympathy with the present movement towards the suppression of the use of opium, and his assurance that, as soon as the Chinese Government should have given practical effect to its protestations," that settlement will follow," or to the statement by his successor, Mr. Landale, in March 1908, that everyone of us has the greatest sympathy with the Chinese nation in its desire to dissipate the opium habit," and that there is every intention on the part of this community to assist "those Chinese officials who are sincere in their desire to eradicate the opium evil. So far from carrying out these professions, the council has permitted, the increase of licensed shops for the sale of opium from 87 in December 1907 to 560 in December 1913.

(b) The failure of the municipality to give effect to the excellent advice it had received from the British Government in 1908, that they "should do more than keep pace with the native authorities," and should be in advance of them and where possible encourage them to follow." Mr. Foster gives his personal testimony to "the thoroughness with which" in the great city of Wachang, where he has long resided, "not only opium houses but shops also, where the drug was formerly sold in the city, have been suppressed," and expresses his belief that the case of Wuchang is typical of what may be seen to-day in many hundreds of large towns and cities in China, from which all signs of opium selling have now vanished.' This testimony is in harmony with that of consuls, Ambassadors, missionaries, and all the evidence, official and unofficial, which it had been possible to collect," of which Mr. Montagu, speaking on behalf of His Majesty's Government, told the House of Commons in May 1913.

(c.) The present chairman of the Municipal Council, in his letter of the 21st September last, intimates the intention of the council to propose to the ratepayers at their meeting next March a scheme for gradually reducing the number of opium shops similar to that by which the opium dens were suppressed at the rate of one-fourth annually from 1908 to 1911. The board would point out that to adopt this method now, after the closing of opium shops has been generally enforced in China for several years, would be an exhibition of want of regard for Chinese opinion and for moral considerations calculated seriously to prejudice Europeans in the eyes of the Chinese people. The chairman may possibly be right in his contention that the effect of such reduction is not likely materially to reduce consumption, seeing that opium is not permitted to be smoked on the premises, and that it can make little difference to a purchaser for consumption at home that he may have to go a little further to procure the drug. The case is in this respect very different from that of opium dens, each of which constituted an additional temptation to indulge in the vice. The proposed measure is thus, on the chairman's own showing, likely to prove a mockery which will rather tend to provoke than to satisfy Chinese feeling.

(d) It is clear that the object of the council in proposing this gradual closing of the licensed opium shops is to allow the opium merchants at Hong Kong and Shanghai to clear out their stocks of Indian opium, which still amounted on the 2nd September last to 9,300 chests. The board would strongly deprecate this subordination of the interests of the Chinese community, the good name of the British nation, and the progress of Christian missions to the pecuniary interests of merchants who have been speculating on the supposed inability of the Chinese Government to carry out the great reform to which it was pledged. These merchants have, moreover, during the past year or two realised enormous profits on all the opium sold by them, so enormous indeed that it is notorious that such profits have many times covered any loss that might now follow the immediate closing of the Shanghai market. They have, therefore, no possible claim to be indemnified against any loss that may accrue to them through its closing. This consideration, it may be observed, equally applies to the closing of the three remaining provinces of Eastern China.

(e) The attitude of the Shanghai Municipal Council, revealed in the corre spondence which has passed between His Majesty's Minister at Peking, His Majesty's

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* Municipal Ethics,” p. 11.

+ Ibid., p. 12,

‡ Ibid., p. 13.

§ Ibid., p. 8.

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consul-general at Shanghai, and the chairman of the Shanghai Municipal Council, is tantamount to a defiance of the British Government. That Sir John Jordan's instructions, dated July 1914, to consul-general Fraser to encourage the reduction of opium-selling licences should be met with a rebuff from the chairman of the Shanghai Municipal Council when he stated that "the subject is not of sufficient importance to justify the calling of a meeting before the regular ratepayers' meeting of March 1915, is equivalent to a claim on the part of the Shanghai Municipal Council that they represent an independent State. It is surely time for the British Government to deal with the assumption that British subjects in the Shanghai settlement, in their capacity as members of its Municipal Council, are independent of the Home Government, under whose protection and ægis they reside in the Far East.

On behalf of the board,

A. CALDECOTT, D.D.,

Chairman.

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