The false principles of this unmercantile transaction (to speak of it in the mildest terms) were too gross not to be visible to those who contrived it. That the Company should be made to borrow such a sum as two hundred thousand pounds[7] at eight per cent, (or terms deemed by the Company to be worse,) in order first to buy a commodity represented by themselves as depreciated in its ordinary market, in order afterwards to carry one half of it through a circuitous trading voyage, depending for its ultimate success on the prudent and fortunate management of two or three sales, and purchases and re-sales of goods, and the chance of two or three markets, with all the risks of sea and enemy, was plainly no undertaking for such a body. The activity, private interest, and the sharp eye of personal superintendency may now and then succeed in such projects; but the remote inspection and unwieldy movements of great public bodies can find nothing but loss in them. Their gains, comparatively small, ought to be upon sure grounds; but here (as the Council states the matter) the private trader actually declines to deal, which is a proof more than necessary to demonstrate the extreme imprudence of such an undertaking on the Company's account. Still stronger and equally obvious objections lay to that member of the project which regards the introduction of a contraband commodity into China, sent at such a risk of seizure not only of the immediate object to be smuggled in, but of all the Company's property in Canton, and possibly at a hazard to the existence of the British factory at that port. It is stated, indeed, that a monopolizing company in Canton, called the Cohong, had reduced commerce there to a deplorable state, and had rendered the gains of private merchants, either in opium or anything else, so small and so precarious that they were no longer able by purchasing that article to furnish the Company with money for a China investment. For this purpose the person whose proposal is accepted declares his project to be to set up a monopoly on the part of the Company against the monopoly of the Chinese merchants: but as the Chinese monopoly is at home, and supported (as the minute referred to asserts) by the country magistrates, it is plain it is the Chinese company, not the English, which must prescribe the terms,--particularly in a commodity which, if withheld from them at their market price, they can, whenever they please, be certain of purchasing as a condemned contraband.