e Indian trade. What was the most effectual
mode of extending that trade was a question which excited general
interest, and which was answered in very different ways.

A small party, consisting chiefly of merchants resident at Bristol and
other provincial seaports, maintained that the best way to extend trade
was to leave it free. They urged the well known arguments which prove
that monopoly is injurious to commerce; and, having fully established
the general law, they asked why the commerce between England and India
was to be considered as an exception to that law. Any trader ought, they
said, to be permitted to send from any port a cargo to Surat or Canton
as freely as he now sent a cargo to Hamburg or Lisbon. [174] In our time
these doctrines may probably be considered, not only as sound, but
as trite and obvious. In the seventeenth century, however, they were
thought paradoxical. It was then generally held to be a certain, and
indeed an almost selfevident truth, that our trade with the countries
lying beyond the Cape of Good Hope could be advantageously carried on
only by means of a great Joint Stock Company. There was no analogy,
it was said, between our European trade and our Indian trade. Our
government had diplomatic relations with the European States. If
necessary, a maritime force could easily be sent from hence to the mouth
of the Elbe or of the Tagus. But the English Kings had no envoy at the
Court of Agra or Pekin. There was seldom a single English man of war
within ten thousand miles of the Bay of Bengal or of the Gulf of Siam.
As our merchants could not, in those remote seas, be protected by
their Sovereign, they must protect themselves, and must, for that
end, exercise some of the rights of sovereignty. They must have forts,
garrisons and armed ships. They must have power to send and receive
embassies, to make a treaty of alliance with one Asiatic prince, to wage
war on another. It was evidently impossible that every merchant should
have this power independently of the rest. The merchants trading to
India must therefore be joined together in a corporation which could act
as one man. In support of these arguments the example of the Dutch was
cited, and was generally considered as decisive. For in that age the
immense prosperity of Holland was every where regarded with admiration,
not the less earnest because it was largely mingled with envy and
hatred. In all that related to trade, her statesmen were consid