The City of London, indeed, is _now_ an exception, and apparently a very weighty one, to this general call; but it will lose much of that weight with the Public, and must fall into the scale of an interested party, when it is recollected, that so long as the question between the Company and the Public was, whether the commerce with India should remain a strict monopoly, or whether a participation in it should be granted to individuals, under the restriction of importing to London the commercial interest of the metropolis was powerfully incited against the Company; and that, to that great commercial interest, supported by the weight of Mr. Dundas's opinion, and to the more enlarged view which Lord Wellesley took of the subject, the extension that has hitherto been given to the private trade with India is to be attributed. The experience of twelve years has now proved, that both India and the parent state have greatly benefited by that extension; and it has followed, as a necessary consequence of that experience, that the active and intelligent merchants of the other large ports of the United Kingdom, have urged their fair pretensions, to be admitted to a share in the profits of that widely diffused trade; by sending their merchandise from their own ports, and by receiving the returning cargoes into their own warehouses, in those ports. A reference to the printed papers (as has already been signified) will show, that the Court of Directors were prevailed upon to concede _the first_ of those points, but that they have been immoveable with respect to _the second_; although their own commercial knowledge must have made it evident to them, that the concession of the first, that is, _a free export_, would be nugatory, unless supported by the benefit arising from the _freedom of import_; which is not only in the proportion of four to one in amount to the export, but is requisite to give that unity to the concern, without which great commercial establishments cannot be kept up.