se and salutary reforms with which the Cabinet had resolved to
accompany the renewal of the India Company's Charter.

So rapid had been the march of events under that strange imperial
system established in the East by the enterprise and valour of three
generations of our countrymen, that each of the periodical revisions
of that system was, in effect, a revolution. The legislation of 1813
destroyed the monopoly of the Indian trade. In 1833 the time had arrived
when it was impossible any longer to maintain the monopoly of the China
trade; and the extinction of this remaining commercial privilege could
not fail to bring upon the Company commercial ruin. Skill, and energy,
and caution, however happily combined, would not enable rulers who were
governing a population larger than that governed by Augustus, and making
every decade conquests more extensive than the conquests of Trajan, to
compete with private merchants in an open market. England, mindful of
the inestimable debt which she owed to the great Company, did not intend
to requite her benefactors by imposing on them a hopeless task. Justice
and expediency could be reconciled by one course, and one only;--that
of buying up the assets and liabilities of the Company on terms the
favourable character of which should represent the sincerity of the
national gratitude. Interest was to be paid from the Indian exchequer
at the rate of ten guineas a year on every hundred pounds of stock;
the Company was relieved of its commercial attributes, and became a
corporation charged with the function of ruling Hindoostan; and its
directors, as has been well observed, remained princes, but merchant
princes no longer.

The machinery required for carrying into effect this gigantic
metamorphosis was embodied in a bill every one of whose provisions
breathed the broad, the fearless, and the tolerant spirit with which
Reform had inspired our counsels. The earlier Sections placed the whole
property of the Company in trust for the Crown, and enacted that "from
and after the 22nd day of April 1834 the exclusive right of trading
with the dominions of the Emperor of China, and of trading in tea, shall
cease." Then came clauses which threw open the whole continent of
India as a place of residence for all subjects of his Majesty; which
pronounced the doom of Slavery; and which ordained that no native of the
British territories in the East should "by reason only of his religion,
place of birth, descen