Page:Hempstead's Reports.pdf/366

Rh   speculation, which its success excited, formed the scheme of a large commercial company, to which it was intended to transfer all the privileges, possessions, and effects of the foreign trading companies that had been incorporated in France."

"The Royal Bank was to be attached to it. The regent gave it letters patent, under the style of the Western Company. From the mighty stream that traverses Louisiana, Law's undertaking was called the Mississippi Scheme. The exclusive trade to China and all the East Indies was afterwards granted to the company now called the India Company." Martin's Louisiana, Vol. I. p. 234.

By a royal edict, in May, 1719, the privileges of the East India and China Company were merged in the Company of the West, and the latter thereafter required to be designated as the Company of the Indies. "Compagnie des lndes." See Receuil des Edicts, &c., Paris, 1720; also White's Recep. Vol. I. p. 656, 657.

It appears, then, that the "Compagnie D'Occident," in 1717, succeeded to the rights of Crozat, with extended privileges; that it was connected with the Royal Bank; that in 1719 the India China Company was blended with the Compagnie D'Occident, and the latter took the name, in virtue of the royal edict, of Company of the Indies, and that during its existence this claim is alleged to have had its origin.

We find it mentioned by Dupratz, who came on to Louisiana with the colony sent in 1718 by the Western Company. In the History of Louisiana (translation published in London, 1774), after referring to the scarcity produced from "the arrival of several grantees all at once," it is stated as follows:—

"The grants were those of M. Law, who was to have fifteen hundred men, consisting of Germans, provencials, &c., to form the settlement. His land being marked out at the Arkansas, consisted of four leagues square, and was erected into a duchy, with accoutrements for a company of dragoons, and merchandise for more than a million of livres. M. Levans, who was trustee of it, had his chaise to visit the different posts of the grant. But M. Law soon after becoming bankrupt, the