Thus, then, any man who looks but a little beyond the objects which lie accidentally before his eyes, may see, that the measure now suggested by Government, instead of being a wild and airy speculation, a theoretical innovation, a _new_, untried, and dangerous experiment, on which we have no ground to reason from experience (as it has been ignorantly and falsely asserted), is nothing more than reverting to an _ancient_ principle, involved in the Company's applauded Charter of the 10th of William the Third, and to the practice of our forefathers in the brightest period of our domestic history; a period, in which the British Constitution received its last perfection, and from which the present power and greatness of the British Empire, in the East and in the West, dates its origin. Having sufficiently proved and established this _great fact_, let us next inquire, what history reveals to us, of _the consequences_ of that import trade to the out-ports, that can tend, in any degree, to justify, or give support to, the Company, in determining to resort to an alternative which, they acknowledge, will subvert the system of Indian Government (and thereby shake the Constitution at home), rather than _renew the measure_ of a regulated trade to the out-ports. We have not to deduce these consequences from _abstract hypothesis_, but from _historical testimony_; let us, then, observe what that testimony unfolds. No evil, of any kind whatever, resulted to the incorporated, or Joint Stock Company, from the privilege enjoyed by the out ports. On the contrary, that _Joint Stock Company_, issuing out of the General Society of Merchants (which, as has been above stated, soon became the English East India Company), rose above all their competitors, notwithstanding the power of importing, without limitation, to _any of the ports of the kingdom_; and such was the rapidity of their progress, that they overcame the former, or London Company; they obtained a surrender of all their rights to St. Helena, Bombay, and all their other islands and settlements in India; they at length received that ancient Company into their own body; and finally became the United East India Company of the present day. And so little did the competition and free import of the general merchants tend to obstruct the growth of the United Company, even in the age of its _infancy_; and so "superior were the advantages they derived from trading with a joint-stock (to use the words of one of the Company's most strenuous champions), that at the time of the union of the two Companies, out of the whole loan of two millions, only 7000l. then remained the property of the _separate traders of the General Society_; and this sum also was soon absorbed in the United Company[4]." If then the Company, starting originally with only a joint stock, against a competition in the out-ports of the kingdom, with a power to import to those out-ports, outstripped and overcame all their