purchases and re-sales of goods, and the chance of
two or three markets, with all the risks of sea and enemy, was plainly
no undertaking for such a body. The activity, private interest, and the
sharp eye of personal superintendency may now and then succeed in such
projects; but the remote inspection and unwieldy movements of great
public bodies can find nothing but loss in them. Their gains,
comparatively small, ought to be upon sure grounds; but here (as the
Council states the matter) the private trader actually declines to deal,
which is a proof more than necessary to demonstrate the extreme
imprudence of such an undertaking on the Company's account. Still
stronger and equally obvious objections lay to that member of the
project which regards the introduction of a contraband commodity into
China, sent at such a risk of seizure not only of the immediate object
to be smuggled in, but of all the Company's property in Canton, and
possibly at a hazard to the existence of the British factory at that
port.

It is stated, indeed, that a monopolizing company in Canton, called the
Cohong, had reduced commerce there to a deplorable state, and had
rendered the gains of private merchants, either in opium or anything
else, so small and so precarious that they were no longer able by
purchasing that article to furnish the Company with money for a China
investment. For this purpose the person whose proposal is accepted
declares his project to be to set up a monopoly on the part of the
Company against the monopoly of the Chinese merchants: but as the
Chinese monopoly is at home, and supported (as the minute referred to
asserts) by the country magistrates, it is plain it is the Chinese
company, not the English, which must prescribe the terms,--particularly
in a commodity which, if withheld from them at their market price, they
can, whenever they please, be certain of purchasing as a condemned
contraband.

There are two further circumstances in this transaction which strongly
mark its character. The first is, that this adventure to China was not
recommended to them by the factory of Canton; it was dangerous to
attempt it without their previous advice, and an assurance, grounded on
the state of the market and the dispositions of the government, that the
measure, in a commercial light, would be profitable, or at least safe.
Neither was that factory applied to on the state of the bills which,
upon their own account, they might be obliged