Rationale for starting the Opium War (#202, Topic H)

Earlier, I wrote about the opium trade (#140) and Commissioner Lin Zexu (#141), who was directed by the emperor to eradicate opium smuggled to China by Britain's East India Company. Last week, my brother-in-law, a fifth-generation descendant of Lin, sent me a box of 20+ books on Lin, which he collected over the years and which, he felt, could serve as the nucleus of a biography on Lin. So, I started to do some preliminary research. Yesterday, at the Library of Congress, I came across an obscure book, touting how the British missionary was able to penetrate into China. The book was revised in 1843, mainly to append two chapters at the end to rationalize the just concluded Opium War (1839/40 - 1842). The wording was so clever that I could not resist the temptation not to quote it.
"That the smuggling of opium into China was wrong, and that the Chinese had a perfect right to stop its importation was freely admitted; but that after forty years winking at it, they [the Chinese government] should adopt such unjust and unheard of measures [requiring that the smuggled opium be given up or risking incarceration], throwing into confinement and threatening with death foreign residents, innocent and guilty, in defiance of all the customs of the civilized nations, was not to be tolerated.
"The events which we have detailed [in the first of the two appended chapters] took place in 1839. In the meantime, the English government had resolved upon its course, and in February 1840, Lord Auckland, at Calcutta, declared war against the Chinese." (Jacob Abbott, China and the English, Cooperstown: Phiney, 1843, p 277).
These British missionaries talked big about being civilized; in reality, they were merely fronts to money-sucking schemes, capable of stooping to great depth, subjugating or destroying lives in the name of making a pound sterling. Not long ago, a British denomination confessed that it was trafficking in African slave trade for over 190 years, which it kept secret for all these years. So much for western civilization. And, of course, starting a war for bringing this shameful money-sucking scheme to an end is something only the western civilization would be proud of. In Abbott's account, "the quantity [of opium] given up was over 20,000 chests [each containing 150 pounds], which were valued nine million dollars!" Perhaps Abbott lamented about the loss of nine million dollars, a large sum truly unheard of at the time. Still, it was merely two-thirds of opium smuggled into China in one year, 1837 -- "30,000 chests", using Abbott's understated figure. Jacques Gernet gave the figure of "at least 40,000 cases" in 1838 -- and of 58,000 cases in 1850, of 96,000 cases in 1873 (#140) -- more than $42 million! On this count, Karl Marx may be excused for expressing this sentiment, in an article he wrote ("The Opium Trade," Swan, 3 September 1858; Marx was a journalist then) "flagrant self-contradiction of the Christianity-canting and civilization-mongering British Government."