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 CO-OPERATIVE IDEA OF THE COMPANY 235 new syndicates or groups of subscribers from among its own members for separate voyages, but under its corporate control. In such latter-day comparisons, however convenient for illustration, there lurks a constant source of error. For the institutions of Elizabethan England were formed not on new patterns for the future but upon the models of the past. The East India Company, like the Levant or Turkey Company, was built on the deep foundations of mediaeval trade. It proceeded on the principle that the protection of trade formed a duty of the sovereign, that protection involved regulation, and that it was beneficial for the nation that each trade should be placed under a guild or corporation with powers of self-management and internal control. Such guilds, while generally deriving their authority from the crown, were chiefly composed of the members of a specific trade, and were designed to defend its interests. No citizen could practise the incorporated trade or craft without being admitted a brother of the guild. But every member once admitted was free to set up business on his own account. A mediaeval town was thus honeycombed with a number of little corpora- tions, each having the monopoly and management of a separate trade, but whose members were all at liberty to trade for themselves under rules formed for their common good. These early attempts to combine the strength of co-operation with freedom of individual initiative survive, after many metamorphoses, in the London City companies. Their modern representatives,