petre and bohea to England, while the Company, in its collective
capacity, might treat with Asiatic potentates, or exact reparation
from them, and might be entrusted with powers for the administration of
justice and for the government of forts and factories?

Montague tried to please all those whose support was necessary to him;
and this he could effect only by bringing forward a plan so intricate
that it cannot without some pains be understood. He wanted two millions
to extricate the State from its financial embarrassments. That sum he
proposed to raise by a loan at eight per cent. The lenders might be
either individuals or corporations. But they were all, individuals and
corporations, to be united in a new corporation, which was to be called
the General Society. Every member of the General Society, whether
individual or corporation, might trade separately with India to an
extent not exceeding the amount which such member had advanced to the
government. But all the members or any of them might, if they so thought
fit, give up the privilege of trading separately, and unite themselves
under a royal Charter for the purpose of trading in common. Thus the
General Society was, by its original constitution, a regulated company;
but it was provided that either the whole Society or any part of it
might become a joint stock company.

The opposition to the scheme was vehement and pertinacious. The Old
Company presented petition after petition. The Tories, with Seymour at
their head, appealed both to the good faith and to the compassion of
Parliament. Much was said about the sanctity of the existing Charter,
and much about the tenderness due to the numerous families which had,
in reliance on that Charter, invested their substance in India stock. On
the other side there was no want of plausible topics or of skill to use
them. Was it not strange that those who talked so much about the Charter
should have altogether overlooked the very clause of the Charter on
which the whole question turned? That clause expressly reserved to
the government power of revocation, after three years' notice, if the
Charter should not appear to be beneficial to the public. The Charter
had not been found beneficial to the public; the three years' notice
should be given; and in the year 1701 the revocation would take effect.
What could be fairer? If anybody was so weak as to imagine that the
privileges of the Old Company were perpetual, when the very instru