Perhaps the most important measure enacted in the session of 1813 was the so-called East India company's act. By this act the charter of the company was renewed with a confirmation of its administrative privileges and its monopoly of the China trade, but subject to material reservations: the India trade was thrown open from April 10, 1814, and the charter itself, thus restricted, was made terminable by three years' notice after April 10, 1831. In this year the naval and military armaments of Great Britain, considered as a whole, perhaps reached their maximum strength, and the national expenditure rose to its highest level, including, as it did, subsidies to foreign powers amounting to about £10,500,000. Of the aggregate expenditure, about two-thirds, £74,000,000, were provided by taxation, an enormous sum relatively to the population and wealth of the country at that period. Patiently as this burden was borne on the whole by the people of Great Britain, we cannot wonder that Vansittart, the chancellor of the exchequer, should have sought to lighten it in some degree by encroaching upon the sinking fund, as founded and regulated by Pitt. The debates on this complicated question, in which Huskisson and Tierney stoutly combated Vansittart's proposal, belong rather to financial history. What strikes a modern student of politics as strange is that Vansittart, tory as he was, should have advocated the relief of living and suffering taxpayers, upon the principle, then undefined, of leaving money "to fructify in the pockets of the people"; while the whig economists of the day stickled for the policy of piling up new debts, if need be, rather than break in upon an empirical scheme for the gradual extinction of old debts. FOOTNOTES: [41] For the whole crisis see Walpole, _Life of Perceval_, ii., 157-96, and for Sheridan's share in the transactions, Moore, _Life of Sheridan_, ii., 382-409. CHAPTER V. THE PENINSULAR WAR.