British subjects had an equal right to share in advantages which had been won by British arms.  The government and Parliament adopted their view, and the renewed charter extinguished not only that monopoly, but even the Company’s exclusive trading privileges in India itself, though these, like the rights of the West India planters over their slaves, were purchased of it by an annuity for forty years, which was estimated as an equivalent for the loss of profit which must result to the proprietors of the Company’s stock from the sudden alteration.  It cannot be said that any constitutional principle was involved in what was merely a commercial regulation, or relaxation of such regulations.  Yet it may not be thought inopportune to mention the transaction thus briefly, as one important step toward the establishment of free-trade, which, at the end of fifty years from the time when Pitt first laid the foundation of it, was gradually forcing itself on all our statesmen, as the only sound principle of commercial intercourse between nations.  The laborious historian of Europe during these years finds fault with the arrangements now made, but only on the ground that they did not go far enough in that direction; that, while “everything was done to promote the commercial and manufacturing interests of England, nothing was done for those of Hindostan;"[229] that, “while English cotton goods were admitted for a nominal duty into India, there was no corresponding advantage thought of to the industry of India in supplying the markets of the country.”  The objection was not unfounded; but the system of which it complains was too one-sided to be long maintained, and in less than ten years a great financial reform had swept away the great mass of import duties, and so far had placed the Indian manufacturer on the same level with his fellow-subjects of English blood.

The disturbances which agitated the first years of the reign of William IV. were not caused solely by the excitement attendant on the passing of the Reform Bill.  There had been extensive agricultural distress in England, which had shown itself in an outbreak of new crimes, the burning of ricks in the farm-yards, and the destruction of machinery, to which the peasantry were persuaded by designing demagogues to attribute the scarcity of employment.  But statesmen of both parties were agreed in believing that a great deal of the poverty which, especially in the agricultural counties, had become the normal condition of the laborer, might be ascribed to the pernicious working of the Poor-law, which subsisted with scarcely any alteration as it had been originally enacted in the reign of Elizabeth.  There was even reason to doubt whether the slight changes which had been made had been improvements.  If they had been in the direction of increased liberality to the poor man who needed parish relief, and had to some extent lessened his discomforts, they had at the same time tended greatly to demoralize both