There was a very close connection between many of these great companies. The East India, for example, was practically an outgrowth of the Levant;[97] while of the two hundred and three members of the Virginia Company, one hundred and sixteen were members of the East India, and thirteen of the Muscovy, ten were to become interested in the Newfoundland, one hundred in the Northwest Passage, forty-six in the Bermuda, and thirty-eight in the New England companies. Members of the Virginia Company were also represented in the African, Levant, Guiana, Guinea, Eastland, Providence, Irish Plantation, and other stock enterprises.[98] To the noblemen and merchants thus brought into close working relations, America was but one of the many irons which they had in the fire, and by no means the most important. Their interest, as that of their successors, was naturally in British trade as a whole, and not in the success of any particular colony, much less in its religious bickerings or political aspirations. From the very beginning, the trade of the Empire was considered paramount to that of any unit, even in England itself. At this very time, King James, in pressing for the union with Scotland, expressed what was later to become the established policy. “It may be,” he said, “that a merchant or two of Bristow or Yarmouth may have a hundred pounds lesse in his packe; but if the Empire gaine and become the greater, it is no matter.”[99] Footnote 97: W. W. Hunter, _History of British India_ (London, 1899), vol. I, p. 244. Footnote 98: Compiled from Brown, _Genesis_, pp. 811-1068. Footnote 99: Cited by Scott, _Joint-Stock Companies_, vol. I, p. 132. These two points thus early made, namely, that the value of colonies lay in their contributing to the empire products otherwise obtainable only from foreigners, and that the interests of the empire as a whole were paramount to those of any section, were well understood by those at the head of colonizing enterprises, and must have been understood also by the more intelligent of the early planters themselves. These views naturally would continue to be held by those who remained at the centre of the empire in England; while those who dwelt on its periphery, in many scattered settlements, would as naturally, in time, tend to lose sight of them, and to consider their own particular interests as greater than those of the empire. The struggle between these centripetal and centrifugal forces was bound to result in warping the imperial structure, though in one case only was it to end in the breaking away of a part of the system. Adjustments, continuing even to the present day, were to save the rest intact; but it is interesting to note the germs of conflict present from the very beginning. The forces which brought that conflict about were operative, in varying degrees, not only in North America, but throughout the entire empire, and extended back to its unconscious inception.