The
monopoly of the trade with China which the Company had hitherto enjoyed
was resented as an injustice by the great body of our merchants and
ship-owners, who contended that all British subjects had an equal right
to share in advantages which had been won by British arms. The
government and Parliament adopted their view, and the renewed charter
extinguished not only that monopoly, but even the Company's exclusive
trading privileges in India itself, though these, like the rights of the
West India planters over their slaves, were purchased of it by an
annuity for forty years, which was estimated as an equivalent for the
loss of profit which must result to the proprietors of the Company's
stock from the sudden alteration. It cannot be said that any
constitutional principle was involved in what was merely a commercial
regulation, or relaxation of such regulations. Yet it may not be thought
inopportune to mention the transaction thus briefly, as one important
step toward the establishment of free-trade, which, at the end of fifty
years from the time when Pitt first laid the foundation of it, was
gradually forcing itself on all our statesmen, as the only sound
principle of commercial intercourse between nations. The laborious
historian of Europe during these years finds fault with the arrangements
now made, but only on the ground that they did not go far enough in that
direction; that, while "everything was done to promote the commercial
and manufacturing interests of England, nothing was done for those of
Hindostan;"[229] that, "while English cotton goods were admitted for a
nominal duty into India, there was no corresponding advantage thought of
to the industry of India in supplying the markets of the country.
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