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A parliamentary right which had slept ever since the reign of Henry the Sixth, the right of the Lower House to impeach great offenders at the bar of the Lords, was revived against the monopolists; and James was driven by the general indignation to leave them to their fate. But the practice of monopolies was only one sign of the corruption of the court.
Another reason for the decrease of profitable commercial openings is the practical extinction of China's tea trade with England, Ceylon and India now supplying the home-market, and although as great a quantity of tea is still exported from China as formerly, it nearly all goes to Russia, and this trade being in the hands of Russian monopolists, there is but little employment for other nationalities, while even here it probably will not be many years before the Russians largely follow our example in abandoning Chinese tea in preference for that of Ceylon and India.
The fur trade was easily controlled as a government monopoly and it was unfair that a needy governor should share its profits. But, after all, such a quarrel was only between rival monopolists. Better a trading governor than one who plundered the people or who by drunken profligacy discredited his office.
The merchants of Rochelle, who had refused to join the company, carried on a bold illicit traffic along the borders of the St. Lawrence, endangering the colony by selling fire-arms to the Indians, eluding pursuit, or, if hard pressed, showing fight; and this was a source of perpetual irritation to the incensed monopolists. The colony could not increase.
By a transposition of letters, which the nature of the substance doubtless confirmed in his mind when it arrived, he always spoke of these convenient strips of celluloid as "flims," and was just now most eloquently indignant that, although he had broken utterly with the Northern Commercial Company and refused to trade with them at all, the supply of "flims" he had received from the mail-order house were labelled "N. C." "Them blamed monopolists has cornered the flims," he exclaimed, and was hardly persuaded that the letters signified "non-curling" and did not darkly hint at a conspiracy in restraint of trade.
English monopolists did not fail on their side to exclaim, when the corn-laws were repealed, "What will become of Great Britain in time of war if she depends on the United States for food?" One thing they fail to observe: it is that this sort of dependence, which results from exchange, from commercial operations, is a reciprocal dependence.
The inhabitants of Guayaquil, like many other young communities, sought to increase their revenues and strengthen their independence by violent restrictions upon foreign commerce and arbitrary support of native monopolists. Lord Cochrane eloquently propounded to them the doctrine of free trade.
The same writer says elsewhere: The feeblest efforts of speculation may cause the price of bread to vary a cent a pound and more: which represents $124,100 for thirty-four million men. I may remark, in passing, that the much-lamented Buret regarded the idea of the existence of monopolists as a popular prejudice.
When it was learned that all these lands were bought in the name of George Ingram, and paid for in cash, the wisacres of the city began to say, "I told you so; these monopolists having visited England have adopted foreign ideas, and now they have returned to buy and hold our valuable lands." George Ingram was reticent, as most successful business men are, for he gave attention to business.
The Eisenach programme declared "the economic dependence of the workmen on the monopolists of the tools of labour the foundation of servitude and social evil," and demanded "the economic emancipation of the working classes."
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