preventing smuggling effectively, all the principal statesmen of China were singularly unanimous in looking at the opium question not, as we might suppose, from a moral point of view, but simply and solely as a financial problem. Their objection to the opium trade was not that it fostered a vice gnawing at the vitals of the nation, but that it caused the balance of the trade to turn against China and that it accordingly drained China of silver and impoverished the nation. The Chinese author of the above-mentioned Annals of the Manchu Dynasty, whilst personally holding the same views of the opium traffic which Elliot held, and occasionally indulging in elaborate tirades concerning the immorality of the traffic in opium, gives, as the reasons why the Chinese Government condemned the trade, purely financial arguments. Formerly, he says, a rule had been in force, that no silver was to be exported and that the whole foreign trade should be conducted by barter, which compelled foreign merchants annually to import half a million dollars, but, he adds, with the expansion of the opium trade it came gradually to pass that a balance of silver had annually to be made up by China. Thus also a Memorial to the Throne, by Wong Tseuk-tsz, which contributed much to the victory eventually scored by the anti-opium party in Peking, argued that the growing consumption of opium was at the root of all China's troubles, because silver was becoming scarce and relatively dear, the value of the tael having advanced from 1,000 to 1,600 cash in price. But since the year 1832, and especially all through the year 1836, the counsels of the pro-opium party were decidedly in the ascendant at Peking and in the provinces. A joint Memorial, presented to the Throne in 1832 by the ex-Viceroy and the Governor of Canton, boldly recommended the licensing of the opium trade on the ground that such a measure would reduce the price of opium and thereby diminish the export of silver, and secretly hinted that the encouragement of the growth of native opium would still further impede the avaricious plans and large profits of
