Balance 1,052,379 ---------- TOTAL _Florins_ 23,087,533 ---------- These Commissioners seemed to entertain no very favourable ideas of the benefits which would arise to private trade from the license it already enjoyed. As a measure much more beneficial to the general trade of Europe and to the Company, they proposed, in lieu of it, to throw open to individuals, under certain restrictions, the trade and navigation from Europe to Bengal and Coromandel. Thus we see these Commissioners sent out with the view of introducing something like free trade on Java, coming to a resolution to take away from it even the little private trade which it had previously been allowed to enjoy. The Company's trade with continental India had already been so much encroached upon by foreigners, that it was judged expedient no longer to exclude the Dutch free trader from his share in the spoil; but it was hoped, by increased strictness, to preserve entire to the Company the exclusive trade in spices, Javan coffee, pepper as far as it was the produce of her own possessions, Japan copper, the opium which was consumed in Java and in the Moluccas, and Javan sugar. The trade of the Dutch Company has thus been brought to the period, when its monopoly was proposed to be almost exclusively confined to Java and the Eastern Islands, including Japan. The causes which operated to destroy the Dutch influence on the continent of India, are too well known to require any particular description. The Dutch had long maintained a decisive superiority, as well on the continent of Asia, as among the Indian islands, until the active exertions of their competitors in trade succeeded in undermining and overturning their monopoly; and as it was natural their weak side should suffer first, it was on the continent, where their establishments were far removed from the chief seat of government, and where they had not been able to insure to themselves those exclusive privileges from the princes of the country which they had exacted from the weaker princes of the Eastern Islands, that other nations, chiefly the French and English, first endeavoured to introduce themselves. After reciprocal jealousies had for some time prevented both nations from making any considerable progress, a successful war at last turned the scale entirely in favour of the English, whose influence, from that period, has been paramount in continental India, and the Dutch East India Company was no longer able to enforce its system of exclusive trade there.