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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from In the South Seas by Robert Louis Stevenson: sell opium. It was only to buy opium that I stole; it is only to
buy opium that anybody steals. And what you ought to do is to let
no opium come here, and no Chinamen.' This is precisely what is
done in Samoa by a native Government; but the French have bound
their own hands, and for forty thousand francs sold native subjects
to crime and death. This horrid traffic may be said to have sprung
up by accident. It was Captain Hart who had the misfortune to be
the means of beginning it, at a time when his plantations
flourished in the Marquesas, and he found a difficulty in keeping
Chinese coolies. To-day the plantations are practically deserted
and the Chinese gone; but in the meanwhile the natives have learned
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