s a sort of slave-driver, to compel the
poor natives to work, without wages, on the Company's plantations. But,
as a matter of fact, though entitled to do so by the Royal Charter, the
Company has elected to engage neither in trade nor in planting, deeming
that their desire to attract capital and population to their territory
will be best advanced by their leaving the field entirely open to
others, for otherwise there would always have been a suspicion that
rival traders and planters were handicapped in the race with a Company
which had the making and the administration of laws and the imposition
of taxation in its hands.

It will be asked, then, if the Company do not make a profit out of
trading, or planting, or mining, what could have induced them to
undertake the Government of a tropical country, some 10,000 miles or
more distant from London, for Englishmen, as a rule, do not invest
hundreds of thousands of pounds with the philanthropic desire only of
benefitting an Eastern race?

The answer to this question is not very plainly put in the Company's
prospectus, which states that its object "is the carrying on of the work
begun by the Provisional Association" (said in the previous paragraphs
of the prospectus to have been the successful accomplishment of the
_completion_ of the pioneer work) "and the further improvement and full
utilization of the vast natural resources of the country, by the
introduction of new capital and labour, which they intend shall be
stimulated, aided and protected by a just, humane and enlightened
Government. The benefits likely to flow from the accomplishment of this
object, in the opening up of new fields of tropical agriculture, new
channels of enterprise, and new markets for the world's manufactures,
are great and incontestable." I quite agree with the framer of the
prospectus that these benefits are great and incontestable, but then
they would be benefits conferred on the world at large at the expense of
the shareholders of the Company, and I presume that the source from
which the shareholders are to be recouped is the surplus revenues which
a wisely administered Government would ensure, by judiciously fostering
colonisation, principally by Chinese, by the sale of the vast acreages
of "waste" or Government lands, by leasing the right to work the
valuable timber forests and such minerals as may be found to exist in
workable quantities, by customs duties and the "farming out" of the
exclus