nce and luxury, which
they were enabled to purchase from foreigners, at reasonable prices,
it was natural for them to pay little regard to the superfluous aid
of the company, more particularly when the latter were no longer
able to sustain the competition, either in the sale or supply of a
multitude of articles, which, thanks to our own national simplicity,
are scarcely known in Spain, whence their outward-bound cargoes are
divided. Hence it follows that, far from the importation and supplies
of the company being missed, it may with great reason be presumed,
that this formal renunciation of this ideal privilege of theirs,
must rather have contributed to secure, in a permanent manner,
adequate supplies for all the wants and whims of the inhabitants of
the colony; and that the publicity of such a determination would act
as a fresh allurement successively to bring to the port of Manila a
host of foreign speculators, anxious to avail themselves of a fresh
opening for commercial pursuits.

[Company not a philanthropy.] The other objection, founded on the
mistaken notion of its being inherent in, and belonging to, the very
essence of the company, to promote the general improvement of the
Philippine Islands, if well considered, will appear equally unjust. It
is, in fact, a ridiculous, although too generally received, a prejudice
to suppose, that the founders of this establishment proposed to
themselves the plan of sinking the money of the shareholders in
clearing the lands, and perfecting the rude manufactures of these
distant Islands. To imagine this to have been one of the principal
objects of the institution, or to suppose that, on this hard condition,
their various privileges and exemptions were granted to them, is so
far from the reality of the fact, that it would only be necessary
to read with attention the 26th article of the quoted royal decree
of creation, in order more correctly to comprehend the origin and
constitutive system of this political body.

"The latter," says the Duke de Almodovar, "is reduced to two principal
points: the first of which is the carrying of the trade of Asia
with that of America and Europe; and the second, the encouragement
and improvement of the productions and manufacturing industry of
the Islands. The one is the essential attribute of the company,
constituting its real character of a mercantile society; and, in the
other respect, it becomes an auxiliary of the government, to whom
the d