Page 334 - Merchants and Mandarins China Trade Era

320.

than lucrative profits. William C. Hunter, in discussing the

trade's endurance in spite of repeated Chinese attempts to end

it, reasoned that the opium trade "had indeed been an easy and

agreeable business for the foreign exile. . .His sales were

pleasantness and his remittances were peace. Transactions

seemed to partake of the nature of the drug; they imparted a

soothing frame of mind with three per cent. commission on sales,

one per cent. on returns, and no bad debtsl" The merchants

were able to maintain a rather detached view of opium. They

"rarely, if ever, saw any one physically or mentally injured

by it."

1
General opinion of the 1830 s, furthermore, rated
alcohol as a worse social evil. Hunter spoke of opium-smoking

as a habit that compared to the foreign residents' habit of

drinking wine. He concluded that "compared with the use of

spiritous liquors in the United States and in England, and the
54
evil consequence of it, that of opium was infinitesirnal.11 This

view of opium also characterized the attitude of the English

missionaries. Although they wrote tracts concerning moral

reform in Chinese society, the English did not treat opium.

They had been at Canton longer than the Americans and had asso­

ciated more closely with the English merchants who had been

54
w· 11 · iam C. Hunter, T,e 'Pan Kwu.e' at Canton e:fore
b
·
··
h
l
Treaty Days, 1825-1844 (London, 1882), pp. 72-73, 80. Samuel
Eliot Morrison, in Maritime History of Massachusetts (Boston
& New York, 192 5), p. 278, writes: "It was commonly asserted
that opium had no more effect on the Chinese than rum on Yankees."
The American Board, seeking to rate opium as the worst social
evil, claimed that the drug was "worse, if possible, than the
introduction, sale and use of ardent spirits." Missionary
Herald, XXXVI, 1 (January 1840), 11.