The Board of Trade appear, indeed, to merit reprehension for disposing of the opium by private contract, as by that means the unerring standard of the public market cannot be applied to it.  But they justified themselves by their success; and one of their members informed your Committee that their last sale had been a good one:  and though he apprehended a fall in the next, it was not such as in the opinion of your Committee could justify the Council-General in having recourse to untried and hazardous speculations of commerce.  It appears that there must have been a market, and one sufficiently lively.  They assign as a reason of this assigned [alleged?] dulness of demand, that the Dutch had been expelled from Bengal, and could not carry the usual quantity to Batavia.  But the Danes were not expelled from Bengal, and Portuguese ships traded there:  neither of them were interdicted at Batavia, and the trade to the eastern ports was free to them.  The Danes actually applied for and obtained an increase of the quantity to which their purchases had been limited; and as they asked, so they received this indulgence as a great favor.  It does not appear that they were not very ready to supply the place of the Dutch.  On the other hand, there is no doubt that the Dutch would most gladly receive an article, convenient, if not necessary, to the circulation of their commerce, from the Danes, or under any name; nor was it fit that the Company should use an extreme strictness in any inquiry concerning the necessary disposal of one of their own staple commodities.

The supply of the Canton treasury with funds for the provision of the next year’s China investment was the ground of this plan.  But the Council-General appear still to have the particular advantage of Mr. Sulivan in view,—­and, not satisfied with breaking so many of the Company’s orders for that purpose, to make the contract an object salable to the greatest advantage, were obliged to transfer their personal partiality from Mr. Sulivan to the contract itself, and to hand it over to the assignees through all their successions.  When the opium was delivered, the duties and emoluments of the contractor ended; but (it appears from Mr. Williamson’s letter, 18th October, 1781, and it is not denied by the Council-General) this new scheme furnished them with a pretext of making him broker for the China investment, with the profit of a new commission,—­to what amount does not appear.  But here their constant and vigilant observer, the vendue-master, met them again:—­they seemed to live in no small terror of this gentleman.  To satisfy him for the loss of his fee to which he was entitled upon the public sale, they gave him also a commission of one per cent on the investment.  Thus was this object loaded with a double commission; and every act of partiality to one person produced a chargeable compensation to some other for the injustice that such partiality produced.  Nor was this the whole.  The discontent and envy excited by this act went infinitely further than to those immediately affected, and something or other was to be found out to satisfy as many as possible.