Page:A School History of England (1911).djvu/194

 The ‘East India Company’ had been founded to trade with the far East (from which the Dutch had steadily driven out the first European traders, the Portuguese), as far back as the end of Elizabeth's reign. Dutch, Frenchmen and Englishmen scrambled against each other to get permission, from the ‘Great Moguls’ and other Eastern Kings with magnificent names, to sell and buy in those countries; and, on the whole, during the seventeenth century the English Company got the best of the trade with Hindostan into its hands. So you see the seeds of a great empire were already sown, and the colonial trade made English merchants both rich and very adventurous.

I wish I could say as much good for Charles II’s reign at home as abroad, but I cannot. And this is mainly because in his reign we feel that England had ceased to be united, and seemed to have little chance of recovering its unity. The notion that ‘all Kings are trying to oppress all peoples’ seems to have grown up; it was the outcome of the Civil War. So there are now two ‘parties’ in Parliament and even in the nation. There are the party of the King and his ministers, and the party of those who are not his ministers, but would like to be. These parties were then called ‘Tories’ and ‘Whigs’; in our days they call themselves ‘Conservatives’ and ‘Liberals’ (or ‘Radicals’). Each was supposed to represent certain principles of government; the Tories were for Church and Crown and gentlemen; the Whigs for Dissenters, for trade, and for all who would bully the King.

Tories were supposed to be against all changes in laws or institutions; the Whigs were supposed to favour moderate and slow changes of law. Both pro-