Dismissing, then, this possibility as one perforce abandoned by the opponents of monopolies, no less than by the opponents of opium, the only other alternative left to us is the total abolition of the growth and manufacture of opium in India. But we are confronted with a difficulty to start with. Do the supporters of this theory mean that the cultivation of opium should be forbidden throughout _all_ India? If so, how are we to deal with the native States which cultivate the poppy, and derive a considerable, in some cases a principal, part of their revenue from this source? A previous attempt to interfere with this cultivation occasioned serious disturbances, and almost a civil war. Are we ready to go to that length to enforce our advanced ideas of total abstinence on the independent States of Holkar and Scindia? If they do not mean this, how are we to prevent the cultivators in Malwa taking up the trade abandoned by us, and instead of 45,000 chests, sending 90,000 to China yearly? Again, if the poppy culture be strictly forbidden in _all_ India, how are the legitimate wants of the Rajpoots and the Sikhs in the Punjaub, and the inhabitants of Orissa and Assam, to be supplied? Shall we go to China for our opium, thereby getting a more deleterious drug at higher prices, and inducing our subjects to substitute for the comparatively beneficial opium the maddening stimulus of bhang and the poisonous mixtures imported under the name of "French brandies," but composed of such deleterious ingredients as potato spirit and fusel oil? It would, indeed, be a strange finale if the success of this agitation should cause China to export opium into India as she already does into Burmah.