greeable things, brought from the
farthest ends of the earth, seemed to the eyes of that day a condition of
things likely to end in a general catastrophe. With a simplicity, amazing
only to those who are inclined to be vain of a superior wisdom--not their
own but that of their wisest contemporaries--one of the chief reasons for
establishing the East India Company was stated to be the necessity of
providing against low prices of Oriental productions in Europe.

But national instinct is often wiser than what is supposed to be high
national statesmanship, and there can be no doubt that the true
foundation of the East India Company was the simple recognition of an
iron necessity. Every merchant in Holland knew full well that the
Portuguese and Spaniards could never be driven out of their commercial
strongholds under the equator, except by a concentration of the private
strength and wealth, of the mercantile community. The Government had
enough on its hands in disputing, inch by inch, at so prodigious an
expenditure of blood and treasure, the meagre territory with which nature
had endowed the little commonwealth. Private organisation, self-help;
union of individual purses and individual brains, were to conquer an
empire at the antipodes if it were to be won at all. By so doing, the
wealth of the nation and its power to maintain the great conflict with
the spirit of the past might be indefinitely increased, and the resources
of Spanish despotism proportionally diminished. It was not to be expected
of Jacob Heemskerk, Wolfert Hermann, or Joris van Spilberg, indomitable
skippers though they were, that each, acting on his own responsibility or
on that of his supercargo, would succeed every day in conquering a whole
Spanish fleet and dividing a million or two of prize-money among a few
dozen sailors. Better things even than this might be done by wholesome
and practical concentration on a more extended scale.

So the States-General granted a patent or charter to one great company
with what, for the time, was an enormous paid-up capital, in order that
the India trade might be made secure and the Spaniards steadily
confronted in what they had considered their most impregnable
possessions. All former trading companies were invited to merge
themselves in the Universal East India Company, which, for twenty-one
years, should alone have the right to trade to the east of the Cape of
Good Hope and to sail through the Straits of Magellan.