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 beginning of this movement to a once well-known merchant and philanthropist of Liverpool, the late Mr. William Rathbone, whom some of us can still remember having known in our earlier years. Miss Martineau had probably good reasons for making such a statement, and, at all events, nothing is more likely than that such a movement began in Liverpool, and began with such a man. In London the directors and supporters of the East India Company were too powerful to give much chance to a hostile movement begun in the metropolis, and it needed the energy, the commercial independence, and the advanced opinions of the northern cities to give it an effective start. {232}