The difficulty of disposing of the opium according to this project being thus got over, a material preliminary difficulty still stood in the way of the whole scheme.  The contractor, or his assignees, were to be paid.  The Company’s treasure was wholly exhausted, and even its credit was exceedingly strained.  The latter, however, was the better resource, and to this they resolved to apply.  They therefore, at different times, opened two loans of one hundred thousand pounds each.  The first was reserved for the Company’s servants, civil and military, to be distributed in shares according to their rank; the other was more general.  The terms of both loans were, that the risk of the voyage was to be on account of the Company.  The payment was to be in bills (at a rate of exchange settled from the supercargoes at Canton) upon the same Company.  In whatever proportion the adventure should fail, either in the ships not safely arriving in China or otherwise, in that proportion the subscribers were to content themselves with the Company’s bonds for their money, bearing eight per cent interest.  A share in this subscription was thought exceeding desirable; for Mr. Hastings writes from Benares, where he was employed in the manner already reported and hereafter to be observed upon, requesting that the subscription should be left open to his officers who were employed in the military operations against Cheyt Sing; and accordingly three majors, seven captains, twenty-three lieutenants, the surgeon belonging to the detachment, and two civil servants of high rank who attended him, were admitted to subscribe.

Bills upon Europe without interest are always preferred to the Company’s bonds, even at the high interest allowed in India.  They are, indeed, so greedily sought there, and (because they tend to bring an immediate and visible distress in Leadenhall Street) so much dreaded here, that by an act of Parliament the Company’s servants are restricted from drawing bills beyond a certain amount upon the Company in England.  In Bengal they have been restrained to about one hundred and eighty thousand pounds annually.  The legislature, influenced more strongly with the same apprehensions, has restrained the Directors, as the Directors have restrained their servants, and have gone so far as to call in the power of the Lords of the Treasury to authorize the acceptance of any bills beyond an amount prescribed in the act.

The false principles of this unmercantile transaction (to speak of it in the mildest terms) were too gross not to be visible to those who contrived it.  That the Company should be made to borrow such a sum as two hundred thousand pounds[7] at eight per cent, (or terms deemed by the Company to be worse,) in order first to buy a commodity represented by themselves as depreciated in its ordinary market, in order afterwards to carry one half of it through a circuitous trading voyage, depending for its ultimate success on the