t I have not mentioned one fourth part of
what has come to my knowledge in your committee; and further, I have
full reason to believe that not one fourth part of the abuses are come
to my knowledge, by that or by any other means. Pray consider what I
have said only as an index to direct you in your inquiries.

If this, then, Sir, has been the use made of the trust of political
powers, internal and external, given by you in the charter, the next
thing to be seen is the conduct of the Company with regard to the
commercial trust. And here I will make a fair offer:--If it can be
proved that they have acted wisely, prudently, and frugally, as
merchants, I shall pass by the whole mass of their enormities as
statesmen. That they have not done this their present condition is proof
sufficient. Their distresses are said to be owing to their wars. This is
not wholly true. But if it were, is not that readiness to engage in
wars, which distinguishes them, and for which the Committee of Secrecy
has so branded their politics, founded on the falsest principles of
mercantile speculation?

The principle of buying cheap and selling dear is the first, the great
foundation of mercantile dealing. Have they ever attended to this
principle? Nay, for years have they not actually authorized in their
servants a total indifference as to the prices they were to pay?

A great deal of strictness in driving bargains for whatever we contract
is another of the principles of mercantile policy. Try the Company by
that test. Look at the contracts that are made for them. Is the Company
so much as a good commissary to their own armies? I engage to select for
you, out of the innumerable mass of their dealings, all conducted very
nearly alike, one contract only the excessive profits on which during a
short term would pay the whole of their year's dividend. I shall
undertake to show that upon two others the inordinate profits given,
with the losses incurred in order to secure those profits, would pay a
year's dividend more.

It is a third property of trading-men to see that their clerks do not
divert the dealings of the master to their own benefit. It was the other
day only, when their Governor and Council taxed the Company's investment
with a sum of fifty thousand pounds, as an inducement to persuade only
seven members of their Board of Trade to give their _honor_ that they
would abstain from such profits upon that investment, as they must have
violated th