a code of manufacturing regulations for that purpose; and several persons were sent out, conversant in the Italian method of preparing and winding silk, aided by proper machines for facilitating and perfecting the work.  This, under proper care, and in course of time, might have produced a real improvement to Bengal; but in the first instance it naturally drew the business from native management, and it caused a revulsion from the trade and manufactures of India which led as naturally and inevitably to an European monopoly, in some hands or other, as any of the modes of coercion which were or could be employed.  The evil was present and inherent in the act.  The means of letting the natives into the benefit of the improved system of produce was likely to be counteracted by the general ill conduct of the Company’s concerns abroad.  For a while, at least, it had an effect still worse:  for the Company purchasing the raw cocoon or silk-pod at a fixed rate, the first producer, who, whilst he could wind at his own house, employed his family in this labor, and could procure a reasonable livelihood by buying up the cocoons for the Italian filature, now incurred the enormous and ruinous loss of fifty per cent.  This appears in a letter to the Presidency, written by Mr. Boughton Rouse, now a member of your Committee.  But for a long time a considerable quantity of that in the old Bengal mode of winding was bought for the Company from contractors, and it continues to be so bought to the present time:  but the Directors complain, in their letter of the 12th of May, 1780, that both species, and particularly the latter, had risen so extravagantly that it was become more than forty per cent dearer than it had been fifteen years ago.  In that state of price, they condemn their servants, very justly, for entering into contracts for three years,—­and that for several kinds of silk, of very different goodness, upon averages unfairly formed, where the commodities averaged at an equal price differed from twenty to thirty per cent on the sale.  Soon after, they formed a regular scale of fixed prices, above which they found they could not trade without loss.

Whilst they were continuing these methods to secure themselves against future losses, the Bengal ships which arrived in that year announced nothing but their continuance.  Some articles by the high price, and others from their ill quality, were such “as never could answer to be sent to Europe at any price.”  The Directors renew their prohibition of making fresh contracts, the present being generally to expire in the year 1781.  But this trade, whose fundamental policy might have admitted of a doubt, as applied to Bengal, (whatever it might have been with regard to England,) was now itself expiring in the hands of the Company, so that they were obliged to apply to government for power to enlarge their capacity of receiving bills upon Europe.  The purchase by these bills they entirely divert from raw silk, and order to be laid out wholly in piece-goods.