=218. Dutch commercial policy.=—We are tempted, by the position that the Netherlands took against Spanish oppression, to ascribe to the Dutch a greater love of liberty than they actually had. The government which they established for themselves was marked by serious faults of oppression and corruption, and their commercial policy was nearly as narrow as that of Spain. The exclusion of foreigners from trade with their distant dependencies was only natural in this period of commerce; even the Dutch, however, were not free to trade as they pleased. The colonial commerce was absorbed by great companies, which were granted a monopoly of trade in certain areas, and which regulated this trade with extreme minuteness. The companies had a complicated organization which prevented efficiency and encouraged the improper use of personal and political influence. =219. The Dutch West India Company.=—The Dutch West India Company, founded in 1621, controlled the trade west of the Cape of Good Hope, comprising commerce with the west coast of Africa, and the east coast of the Americas. This company was an extraordinary specimen of its kind. It paid high dividends for a time, but its earnings were necessarily precarious for it made them not from the ordinary operations of commerce and colonization, but from armed attacks on the Spanish silver fleets. It was really a corporation of privateers. The character of the company can be estimated from the fact that it actually opposed peace between the Netherlands and Spain; in its remonstrance of 1633 it said that the services desired of it “for the welfare of our Fatherland and the destruction of our hereditary enemy could not be accomplished by the trifling trade with the Indians, or the tardy cultivation of uninhabited regions, but in reality, by acts of hostility against the ships and property of the King of Spain and his subjects.” The Dutch soon lost their possessions in Brazil and New Netherland (New York), and the original company was dissolved; the possessions which the Dutch retained on the coast of Guinea and in South America were unimportant. Small islands in the Gulf of Mexico, which in themselves produced little of value, served as stations for the Dutch carrying trade, which continued to be considerable. =220. The East India Company.=—The East India Company, founded in 1602, which secured from the Dutch government the monopoly of trade and rule from the Cape of Good Hope to the Straits of Magellan, enjoyed a longer existence. It established trading stations on various points of the Asiatic coast and in South Africa, but found the mainstay of its power in the rich islands of the Malay archipelago, especially in the small group of spice islands and in Java. Here it broke the power of the Portuguese, and gained for itself a partial or total monopoly of some of the products, which were among the most highly prized luxuries of Europe.