therefore, and so the Presidency of Calcutta represented the matter, to provide beforehand a year’s advance.  This required great efforts; and they were made.  Notwithstanding the famine in 1770, which wasted Bengal in a manner dreadful beyond all example, the investment, by a variety of successive expedients, many of them of the most dangerous nature and tendency, was forcibly kept up; and even in that forced and unnatural state it gathered strength almost every year.  The debts contracted in the infancy of the system were gradually reduced, and the advances to contractors and manufacturers were regularly made; so that the goods from Bengal, purchased from the territorial revenues, from the sale of European goods, and from the produce of the monopolies, for the four years which ended with 1780, when the investment from the surplus revenues finally closed, were never less than a million sterling, and commonly nearer twelve hundred thousand pounds.  This million is the lowest value of the goods sent to Europe for which no satisfaction is made.[4]

[Sidenote:  Remittances from Bengal to China and the Presidencies.]

About an hundred thousand pounds a year is also remitted from Bengal, on the Company’s account, to China; and the whole of the product of that money flows into the direct trade from China to Europe.  Besides this, Bengal sends a regular supply in time of peace to those Presidencies which are unequal to their own establishment.  To Bombay the remittance in money, bills, or goods, for none of which there is a return, amounts to one hundred and sixty thousand pounds a year at a medium.

[Sidenote:  Exports from England to India.]

The goods which are exported from Europe to India consist chiefly of military and naval stores, of clothing for troops, and of other objects for the consumption of the Europeans residing there; and, excepting some lead, copper utensils and sheet copper, woollen cloth, and other commodities of little comparative value, no sort of merchandise is sent from England that is in demand for the wants or desires of the native inhabitants.

[Sidenote:  Bad effects of investment.]

When an account is taken of the intercourse (for it is not commerce) which is carried on between Bengal and England, the pernicious effects of the system of investment from revenue will appear in the strongest point of view.  In that view, the whole exported produce of the country, so far as the Company is concerned, is not exchanged in the course of barter, but is taken away without any return or payment whatsoever.  In a commercial light, therefore, England becomes annually bankrupt to Bengal to the amount nearly of its whole dealing; or rather, the country has suffered what is tantamount to an annual plunder of its manufactures and its produce to the value of twelve hundred thousand pounds.

[Sidenote:  Foreign companies.]

[Sidenote:  Consequences of their trade.]