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36 chosen instruments of Rome, though not at the white heat of a decade earlier, still burned with steady brilliancy in the Englishman's breast. It was peculiarly a beacon light in the City of London, where more than elsewhere in the country, perhaps, there was a clearer appreciation of all that an independent England implied in the material sphere and where intimate contact with the Court lent a natural breadth and spaciousness to men's views on external politics. In such an environment there would naturally be a full recognition of the fact that the religious phase of the struggle which had ended so decisively in 1588 needed a further effort for the vindication of the nation's rights to a trade which would not be fettered by the arbitrary decrees of a hated foreign ascendancy. To the English mercantile community the mere assertion of a right to monopolize the trade of the East on the part of Portugal and Spain appeared as an affront to the dignity of the country which must be met by effectual steps to establish a distinctively English trade in the prohibited regions. Thus reasoning they brought to their practical deliberations a spirit of patriotic zeal which had its influence in shaping the enterprise and giving to it the national character it ultimately largely assumed.

Few of those busy city men whose hurrying feet on week days re-echo through the dingy purlieus of Founder's Court in Lothbury, in the heart of the City of London, are aware that within a few yards of that spot was witnessed the birth of the organization which established the foundations of British power in the East. The old Founder's Hall, which was the cradle of the mighty British Indian Empire, went the way of many other famous buildings in the Great Fire of London, but the tradition remains,