prudent and fortunate management of two or three sales, and purchases and re-sales of goods, and the chance of two or three markets, with all the risks of sea and enemy, was plainly no undertaking for such a body.  The activity, private interest, and the sharp eye of personal superintendency may now and then succeed in such projects; but the remote inspection and unwieldy movements of great public bodies can find nothing but loss in them.  Their gains, comparatively small, ought to be upon sure grounds; but here (as the Council states the matter) the private trader actually declines to deal, which is a proof more than necessary to demonstrate the extreme imprudence of such an undertaking on the Company’s account.  Still stronger and equally obvious objections lay to that member of the project which regards the introduction of a contraband commodity into China, sent at such a risk of seizure not only of the immediate object to be smuggled in, but of all the Company’s property in Canton, and possibly at a hazard to the existence of the British factory at that port.

It is stated, indeed, that a monopolizing company in Canton, called the Cohong, had reduced commerce there to a deplorable state, and had rendered the gains of private merchants, either in opium or anything else, so small and so precarious that they were no longer able by purchasing that article to furnish the Company with money for a China investment.  For this purpose the person whose proposal is accepted declares his project to be to set up a monopoly on the part of the Company against the monopoly of the Chinese merchants:  but as the Chinese monopoly is at home, and supported (as the minute referred to asserts) by the country magistrates, it is plain it is the Chinese company, not the English, which must prescribe the terms,—­particularly in a commodity which, if withheld from them at their market price, they can, whenever they please, be certain of purchasing as a condemned contraband.

There are two further circumstances in this transaction which strongly mark its character.  The first is, that this adventure to China was not recommended to them by the factory of Canton; it was dangerous to attempt it without their previous advice, and an assurance, grounded on the state of the market and the dispositions of the government, that the measure, in a commercial light, would be profitable, or at least safe.  Neither was that factory applied to on the state of the bills which, upon their own account, they might be obliged to draw upon Europe, at a time when the Council of Bengal direct them to draw bills to so enormous an amount.