njoyed
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." The
objection was not unfounded; but the system of which it complains was
too one-sided to be long maintained, and in less than ten years a great
financial reform had swept away the great mass of import duties, and so
far had placed the Indian manufacturer on the same level with his
fellow-subjects of English blood.

The disturbances which agitated the first years of the reign of William
IV. were not caused solely by the excitement attendant on the passing of
the Reform Bill. There had been extensive agricultural distress in
England, which had shown itself in an outbreak of new crimes, the
burning of ricks in the farm-yards, and the destruction of machinery, to
which the peasantry were persuaded by designing demagogues to attribute
the scarcity of employment. But statesmen of both p