Company _to keep their Indian Empire, and their exclusive China trade_? Or will it be the Conductors of the East India Company, who shall suffer this great machine suddenly to stop its action, _because their limited exclusive privileges are not made perpetual_? GRACCHUS. LETTER VI. _Friday, January 22, 1813._ Gracchus is charged, by some of the champions of the East India Company, with error and a want of candour, because he has represented the Directors to have maintained, that opening the import trade from India to the out-ports of the kingdom, involves a question of the last importance to the British Empire in India, and to the British Constitution at home; and those writers affirm, that the Directors do not deduce the danger of those great interests from the question of the out-port trade, but from the question of disturbing the present system of administering the Government of India. Yet he can discover, neither error nor want of candour in his statement. If those advocates will take the pains to follow the whole argument of the Directors, on the present occasion, throughout, they must be sensible, that his statement cannot be controverted. The Directors, indeed, avoid expressing their proposition in the fair and distinct form in which it is here drawn out; yet such is the proposition in effect. For, if the whole of it be reduced into a form of syllogism, it is no other than this:-- "Whatever shall cause the subversion of the present system of Indian Government, will cause danger to the Empire and Constitution. "But, pressing the extension of _an import trade from India to the out-ports_, will cause the subversion of the present system of Indian Government. "Therefore, _pressing the extension of an import trade to the out-ports, will cause danger to the Empire and Constitution_." If we question the _minor_ proposition, and ask, Why, pressing an import trade for the out-ports, should necessarily cause the subversion of the existing system of Indian Government? the answer of the Directors is already given:--Because they _will not_ continue to carry on that Government, if an import trade from India should be granted to the out-ports. Thus, the original statement is demonstrably established; and all the logic of the City cannot overturn it. The Directors must permit the words "_will not_;" for, with the record of the East India Company's history before us, it is impossible to say they _cannot_. In proof of this assertion, let us take a review of that history, and let us examine, what evil resulted to the Company, _during the period that the import trade from India_ WAS ACTUALLY _extended to the out-ports of Great Britain_.