and the Caesars, and of
the qualities also which go to the expansion of peaceful commerce and the
opening up of markets for purely industrial enterprise. The charter of
the Company had been renewed by legislation at long intervals, and the
first reformed Parliament now found itself compelled to settle the
conditions under which the charter should be renewed for another period
of twenty years. Mr. Molesworth justly remarks that "it was a fortunate
circumstance that the Reform Bill had passed, and a Reform Parliament
been elected, before the question of the renewal of the Company's charter
was decided; for otherwise the directors of this great Company and other
persons interested in the maintenance of the monopolies and abuses
connected with it would in all probability have returned to Parliament,
by means of rotten boroughs, a party of adherents sufficiently large to
have effectually prevented the Government and the House of Commons from
dealing with {231} this great question in the manner in which the
interests of England and India alike demanded that it should be dealt
with."

Up to the time at which we have now arrived the East India Company had an
almost absolute monopoly of the whole Chinese trade, as well as the
Indian trade, and a control over the administration of India such as
might well have gratified the ambition of a despotic monarch. The last
renewal of the Company's charter had been in 1813, and it was to run for
twenty years, so that Lord Grey's Government found themselves charged
with the task of making arrangements for its continuance, or its
modifications, or its abolition. Some distinction had already been
effected between the powers of the Company as the ruler of a vast Empire
under the suzerainty of England, and its powers as a huge commercial
corporation, or what we should now call a syndicate, but the company
still retained its monopoly of the India and China trade. In the mean
time, however, the principles of political economy had been asserting a
growing influence over the public intelligence, and the question was
coming to be asked, more and more earnestly, why a private company should
be allowed the exclusive right of conducting the trade between England
and India and China. An agitation against the monopoly began, as was but
natural, among the great manufacturing and commercial towns in the North
of England. Miss Martineau, in her "History of the Thirty Years' Peace,"
ascribes the begin