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was employed at the India House as Assistant-Examiner of India Correspondence.1

In Bengal the cultivation of poppy was altogether prohibited except for the purpose of selling the juice to the Government. Cultivators, wishing to cultivate the plant, were permitted to do so only on condition of their delivering the juice to the Government at a fixed price. The juice was then sent to the two principal factories, one at Patna and one at Benares, where it was manufactured into opium and then sent down to Calcutta. It was there sold by auction, and the Government revenue consisted in the difference between the price it had cost the Government, and the price which was realised for it from the merchants who exported it to China.

In Bombay no poppy was cultivated and no opium was manufactured; the Company's opium revenue was derived from the opium grown and manufactured in the Native State of Malwa. Merchants of that State sent the opium to the British port of Bombay for export to China; and the British Government realised a duty of £40 on each chest (123 lbs.) of opium on its passage through British territory. Previous to 1843, the Malwa opium used to pass out of India by way of Sindh; but after the British conquest of Sindh in that year, there was no exit for that opium except through British territory, and on payment of the duty on the transit which formed the opium revenue of Bombay. The conquest of Sindh had thus a pecuniary value in increasing the opium revenue of Bombay.

In Madras no opium was produced.

There has been much controversy in England as to whether the Opium Revenue can really be called a tax on the people of India, whether the wars undertaken in China for maintaining the revenue were justifiable, and whether the opium monopoly should still be retained by 1 Commons' Fourth Report, 1853.

the Indian Government at the present time. The object of the present work is to place facts before our readers to enable them to form their own judgments, and we have no desire to enter into these controversies. No sound economist will, we think, deny that a Government monopoly, which excludes the people from a profitable industry, and stops cultivation, manufacture and trade in a paying article, is a tax on the people, in the truest sense of the word. No impartial historian has defended Lord Palmerston's wars in China in order to force the Chinese to admit Indian opium into their ports against the wishes of their Government. And no sober statesman desires to keep up the Government monopoly in this article, if it can be safely dispensed with.

At the same time, as opium is not a general article of food, the people of India do not consider the Government monopoly in the article to be nearly as hurtful to the people as the salt monopoly. There is no strong feeling in India against the first as there is against the second. Still they believe the Government would do well to abolish the monopoly as a monopoly, and derive a legitimate income by imposing heavy duties on the manufacture and sale of the article, as duties are imposed on the sale of all intoxicating drugs and liquors. The British Indian Association fairly represented the opinion of the people of India in their Petition to the House of Commons. 1

"Justice requires that the interference of the Government with the cultivation should cease, and that revenue derived from the drug should be in the shape of fixed duties on manufacture and exportation, but principally on the latter, as is in some measure the case with regard to Malwa opium. By the adoption of this principle, the cultivators will possess that freedom of action which all men possess under Governments which are not constituted on arbitrary and despotic principles; and whatever is lost by such an arrangement will be more than 1 Commons' First Report, 1853, Appendix 7.

made up by the saving that will ensue from the abolition of the expensive establishments which are now necessary."

The appeal, however, was in vain. Neither the East India Company, nor the Government of the Crown which succeeded in 1858, was willing to surrender the monopoly, or exchange it for a tax on the production and exportation of opium.

CHAPTER X

TARIFFS, IMPORTS, AND EXPORTS

VARIOUS Acts were passed from time to time between 1833 and 1853 by the Indian Legislature to regulate Trade and Navigation and to fix the Tariff.1 The duties which were levied in 1852 on some of the principal articles imported into India are shown in the following table :

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Appendix 3° of the Commons' Report of 1852, from which the above figures are compiled, also gives us the value of the imports and exports of Bengal, Madras, and Bombay, for sixteen years from 1834-35 to 1849-50. In the following two tables we have taken a pound sterling as equivalent to 10 rupees.

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An examination of the figures set forth herein suggests some observations. It will be perceived at once that while the imports and exports of Bengal and Bombay advanced by rapid strides, those of Madras showed a very poor increase. The imports of Bombay and of Bengal increased from two and a half millions to six millions;. the imports of Madras increased from £600,000 to a million. Exports from Bombay increased from three to. six and a half millions, and from Bengal from four to ten and a half millions, while exports from Madras increased only from a million to a million and a half. These striking differences were not due to any extension of

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