precious metals from being exported in the natural course of
trade. We have learned from all history, and from our own
experience, that revenue cutters, custom-house officers,
informers, will never keep out of any country foreign luxuries of
small bulk for which consumers are willing to pay high prices,
and will never prevent gold and silver from going abroad in
exchange for such luxuries. We cannot believe that what England
with her skilfully organised fiscal system and her gigantic
marine, has never been able to effect, will be accomplished by
the junks which are at the command of the mandarins of China.
But, whatever our opinion on these points may be, we are
perfectly aware that they are points which it belongs not to us
but to the Emperor of China to decide. He had a perfect right to
keep out opium and to keep in silver, if he could do so by means
consistent with morality and public law. If his officers seized
a chest of the forbidden drug, we were not entitled to complain;
nor did we complain. But when, finding that they could not
suppress the contraband trade by just means, they resorted to
means flagrantly unjust, when they imprisoned our innocent
countrymen, when they insulted our Sovereign in the person of her
representative, then it became our duty to demand satisfaction.
Whether the opium trade be a pernicious trade is not the
question. Take a parallel case: take the most execrable crime
that ever was called a trade, the African slave trade. You will
hardly say that a contraband trade in opium is more immoral than
a contraband trade in negroes. We prohibited slave-trading: we
made it felony; we made it piracy; we invited foreign powers to
join with us in putting it down; to some foreign powers we paid
large sums in order to obtain their co-operation; we employed our
naval force to intercept the kidnappers; and yet it is notorious