Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 2).djvu/502

 *merce: sources it is not our province to explore; and perhaps, for the credit of England, it would be better if a veil could be drawn over many of the acts of the Company and its servants. Nor were the Directors, whatever they may have been as individuals, competent, as a body, to conduct a lucrative commerce at distances so remote. "It was not in the nature of things," remarks Mr. McCulloch, "that the Company's purchases could be fairly made; the natives could not deal with their servants as they would have dealt with private individuals, and it would be absurd to suppose that agents authorized to buy on account of government, and to draw on the public treasury for the means of payment, should generally evince the prudence and discretion of individuals directly responsible in their own private fortunes for their transactions. The interference of such persons would, under any circumstances, have rendered the East Indian trade peculiarly hazardous. But their influence in this respect was materially aggravated by the irregularity of their appearances. No individual not belonging to the Court of Directors could foresee whether the Company's agents would be in the market at all, or, if there, to what extent they would either purchase or sell. So capricious were their proceedings, that in some years they laid out 700,000l. on indigo, while in others they did not lay out a single shilling, and so with other things. A fluctuating demand of this sort necessarily occasioned great and sudden variations of price, and was injurious alike to the producers and the private merchants."

Indeed when, in 1832, the renewal of the Com-*