The first two sessions of the succeeding Parliament were so short and
so busy that little was said about India in either House. But, out
of Parliament, all the arts both of controversy and of intrigue were
employed on both sides. Almost as many pamphlets were published about
the India trade as about the oaths. The despot of Leadenhall Street was
libelled in prose and verse. Wretched puns were made on his name. He was
compared to Cromwell, to the King of France, to Goliath of Gath, to the
Devil. It was vehemently declared to be necessary that, in any Act which
might be passed for the regulation of our traffic with the Eastern seas,
Sir Josiah should be by name excluded from all trust. [172]

There were, however, great differences of opinion among those who agreed
in hating Child and the body of which he was the head. The manufacturers
of Spitalfields, of Norwich, of Yorkshire, and of the Western counties,
considered the trade with the Eastern seas as rather injurious than
beneficial to the kingdom. The importation of Indian spices, indeed, was
admitted to be harmless, and the importation of Indian saltpetre to be
necessary. But the importation of silks and of Bengals, as shawls were
then called, was pronounced to be a curse to the country. The effect of
the growing taste for such frippery was that our gold and silver went
abroad, and that much excellent English drapery lay in our warehouses
till it was devoured by the moths. Those, it was said, were happy days
for the inhabitants both of our pasture lands and of our manufacturing
towns, when every gown, every hanging, every bed, was made of materials
which our own flocks had furnished to our own looms. Where were now
the brave old hangings of arras which had adorned the walls of lordly
mansions in the days of Elizabeth? And was it not a shame to see a
gentleman, whose ancestors had worn nothing but stuffs made by English
workmen out of English fleeces, flaunting in a calico shirt and a pair
of silk stockings? Clamours such as these had, a few years before,
extorted from Parliament the Act which required that the dead should
be wrapped in woollen; and some sanguine clothiers hoped that the
legislature would, by excluding all Indian textures from our ports,
impose the same necessity on the living. [173]

But this feeling was confined to a minority. The public was, indeed,
inclined rather to overrate than to underrate the benefits which might
be derived by England from th