The principle of buying cheap and selling dear is the first, the great foundation of mercantile dealing.  Have they ever attended to this principle?  Nay, for years have they not actually authorized in their servants a total indifference as to the prices they were to pay?

A great deal of strictness in driving bargains for whatever we contract is another of the principles of mercantile policy.  Try the Company by that test.  Look at the contracts that are made for them.  Is the Company so much as a good commissary to their own armies?  I engage to select for you, out of the innumerable mass of their dealings, all conducted very nearly alike, one contract only the excessive profits on which during a short term would pay the whole of their year’s dividend.  I shall undertake to show that upon two others the inordinate profits given, with the losses incurred in order to secure those profits, would pay a year’s dividend more.

It is a third property of trading-men to see that their clerks do not divert the dealings of the master to their own benefit.  It was the other day only, when their Governor and Council taxed the Company’s investment with a sum of fifty thousand pounds, as an inducement to persuade only seven members of their Board of Trade to give their honor that they would abstain from such profits upon that investment, as they must have violated their oaths, if they had made at all.

It is a fourth quality of a merchant to be exact in his accounts.  What will be thought, when you have fully before you the mode of accounting made use of in the Treasury of Bengal?  I hope you will have it soon.  With regard to one of their agencies, when it came to the material part, the prime cost of the goods on which a commission of fifteen per cent was allowed, to the astonishment of the factory to whom the commodities were sent, the Accountant-General reports that he did not think himself authorized to call for vouchers relative to this and other particulars,—­because the agent was upon his honor with regard to them.  A new principle of account upon honor seems to be regularly established in their dealings and their treasury, which in reality amounts to an entire annihilation of the principle of all accounts.

It is a fifth property of a merchant, who does not meditate a fraudulent bankruptcy, to calculate his probable profits upon the money he takes up to vest in business.  Did the Company, when they bought goods on bonds bearing eight per cent interest, at ten and even twenty per cent discount, even ask themselves a question concerning the possibility of advantage from dealing on these terms?