OPIUM FACTORY AT PATNA. 233 
Even the best East Indian opium is inferior to the Turkish, 
and owing to peculiarities of climate, probably will always be so. 
It never yields more than five per cent of morphia, whence its in- 
feriority, but is as good in other respects, and even richer in narcotine. 
Dr. Royle is mistaken in nee ier. that any Indian opium has been 
raised equal to the Tur 
The care and enar devoted to every department of collecting, 
Foun manipulating, and packing, is quite extraordinary; and the 
t has been an impulse to the trade, beyond what was even antici- 
pisi The natives have been quick at apprehending and supplying 
the wants of the market, and now there are more demands for licenses 
to grow opium than can be granted. 
All the opium eaten in India, is given out with a permit to licensed 
dealers; and the drug is so adulterated before it reaches the retailers 
in the bazaars, that it does not contain one thirtieth part of the intoxi- 
cating power that pure opium does. 
. Opium has been a source of enormous revenue to the East India 
Company, and is still by far its most profitable export. How long it 
will remain so is now the problem; already the market-value is consi- 
derably fallen, and the Chinese are practising the cultivation of the 
drug very extensively, and any differences with that Empire are disas- 
trous to the opium-dealers. Under no circumstances can it be expected 
that China will eventually maintain the ambiguous policy of covertly 
promoting the import of a pernicious drug, at an enormously high 
price, the consumption of which she forbids. Her interest plainly is to 
enforce this prohibition, or to remove it and grow the Poppy in the 
Celestial Empire. I need not trouble you with the vezaéa questio of the 
moral right which the Company have to encourage the traffic in this 
narcotic, in defiance of a nation with which we are at peace, and to 
whose prejudice it is cultivated. 
This is but a meagre sketch of all I saw and learned this morning ; 
for not only is the subject and its preparation most interesting, but as 
a publie concern I was much struck with the perfect order and re- 
gularity and the completeness of the whole arrangements, whether in 
the scientific department, the mechanical department or the financial. 
Dr. Corbett, too, had the tact of putting it all in the simplest and clearest 
view, and I wish that I did justice to his excellent practical lecture. 
VOL. I. 2H 
