It was well known too that the profits of the East India Company had vastly increased of late, and were augmenting with every year.  The trade with Cambay, Malabar, Ceylon, Koromandel, and Queda, had scarcely begun, yet was already most promising.  Should the Hollanders only obtain a footing in China, they felt confident of making their way through the South Seas and across the pole to India.  Thus the search for a great commercial highway between Cathay, Europe, and the New World, which had been baffled in the arctic regions, should be crowned with success at the antarctic, while it was deemed certain that there were many lands, lighted by the Southern Cross, awaiting the footsteps of the fortunate European discoverer.  What was a coasting-trade with Spain compared with this boundless career of adventure?  Now that the world’s commerce, since the discovery of America and the passage around the Cape of Good Hope, had become oceanic and universal, was the nation which took the lead on blue water to go back to the creeping land-locked navigation of the ancient Greeks and Phoenicians?  If the East India Company, in whose womb was empire, were now destroyed, it would perish with its offspring for ever.  There would be no regeneration at a future day.  The Company’s ships too were a navy in themselves, as apt for war as for trade.  This the Spaniards and Portuguese had already learned to their cost.  The merchant-traders to Spain would be always in the power of Spain, and at any favourable moment might be seized by Spain.  The Spanish monopoly in the East and West was the great source of Spanish power, the chief cause of the contempt with, which the Spanish monarchy looked down upon other nations.  Let those widely expanded wings be clipped, and Spain would fall from her dizzy height.  To know what the States ought to refuse the enemy, it was only necessary to observe what he strenuously demanded, to ponder the avowed reason why he desired peace.  The enemy was doing his best to damage the commonwealth; the States were merely anxious to prevent injury to themselves and to all the world; to vindicate for themselves, and for all men, the common use of ocean, land, and sky.

A nation which strove to shut up the seas, and to acquire a monopoly of the world’s trade, was a pirate, an enemy of mankind.  She was as deserving of censure as those who created universal misery in time of famine, by buying up all the corn in order to enrich themselves.  According to the principles of the ancients, it was legitimate to make war upon such States as closed their own ports to foreign intercourse.  Still more just was it, therefore, to carry arms against a nation which closed the ports of other people.

The dispute about the India navigation could be settled in a moment, if Spain would but keep her word.  She had acknowledged the great fact of independence, which could not be gainsaid.  Let each party to the negotiation, therefore keep that which it already possessed.  Let neither attempt to prescribe to the other—­both being free and independent States—­any regulations about interior or foreign trade.