ragraphs before. To prevent silk-winders from working in their private
houses, where they might work for private traders, and to confine them
to the Company's factories, where they could only be employed for the
Company's benefit, they desire that the newly acquired power of
government should be effectually employed. "Should," say they, "this
practice, through _inattention_, have been suffered to take place again,
it will be proper to put a stop to it, which may _now be more
effectually done by an absolute prohibition, under severe penalties, by
the authority of government_."

This letter contains a perfect plan of policy, both of compulsion and
encouragement, which must in a very considerable degree operate
destructively to the manufactures of Bengal. Its effect must be (so far
as it could operate without being eluded) to change the whole face of
that industrious country, in order to render it a field for the produce
of crude materials subservient to the manufactures of Great Britain. The
manufacturing hands were to be seduced from their looms by high wages,
in order to prepare a raw produce for our market; they were to be locked
up in the factories; and the commodity acquired by these operations was,
in this immature state, carried out of the country, whilst its looms
would be left without any material but the debased refuse of a market
enhanced in its price and scanted in its supply. By the increase of the
price of this and other materials, manufactures formerly the most
flourishing gradually disappeared under the protection of Great Britain,
and were seen to rise again and flourish on the opposite coast of India,
under the dominion of the Mahrattas.

These restraints and encouragements seem to have had the desired effect
in Bengal with regard to the diversion of labor from manufacture to
materials. The trade of raw silk increased rapidly. But the Company very
soon felt, in the increase of price and debasement of quality of the
wrought goods, a loss to themselves which fully counterbalanced all the
advantages to be derived to the nation from the increase of the raw
commodity. The necessary effect on the revenue was also foretold very
early: for their servants in the principal silk-factories declared that
the obstruction to the private trade in silk must in the end prove
detrimental to the revenues, and that the investment clashes with the
collection of these revenues. Whatsoever by bounties or immunities is
encourag