1921 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 601 eighteenth century a plutocracy governed Great Britain. Thus the East India Company became a pioneer in many directions. In the East, at first a foreign ' Hansa ' with self-contained factories, a foreign body within the Mogul organism, it made experimental adjustments with the Indian country powers ; later became at Calcutta an accredited agent and official of that empire, finally a sovereign power treating with the rest on equal and on superior terms. In trade, too, the Company explored new methods, tested principles not then fully recognized, and so made economic as well as political law. Vehemently accused of breaking the medieval rules by deplet- ing England of treasure, it proved triumphantly that its output was seed returning a rich crop of wealth in kind to the mother country, and its stock by 1765 became the greatest prize of speculators. In its operations, as in a mirror, Adam Smith could read the clear lines of his Wealth of Nations. But it was self-contradictory in its economic policies because it faced two ways. Firmly entrenched in protection itself, it was a hard and fast monopoly with regard to its English rivals ; yet in India it seems to have been the pioneer of free trade. Again and again ' free and open trade ' within the limits of its producing area is the text of the directors' sermons to their councils abroad, 1 yet in the same correspondence they urge them to the severest measures against all interlopers in their markets. In the life of William Bolts Mr. Hallward illustrates these facts and the effect of them by the doings of a man who, like the Company itself, played a double part. Ostensibly a servant of the Company, he was really far more concerned to promote his own private trade and amass a fortune. Ejected by force from his post and from India, he then assumed with equal ardour the part of interloper and enemy of the monopolist Company. Living as he did while the Company was in transition from the phase of tolerated foreign traders to that of the sovereigns of India, Bolts can hardly be blamed, as he might be half a century later, for challenging that claim to sovereignty, nor for using the then recognized right of a Company's servant to exploit private trade. The excesses to which his operations led him in the treatment of natives were faults of which most of his fellows and superiors were equally guilty, and the restraint of which was as much their responsibility as his own. It was for the finer souls among them in the next decade to take up this responsibility and to set up the first standards of a code of honour unsurpassed by any nation in their treatment of subject peoples. Bolts was not to be of that great company. Enraged, not without excuse, that those who envied and emulated his gains should pronounce judgement upon him, and perceiving with his keen intellect that the causa causarum lay with the exponents of a rotten system, he spent the rest of his days exposing and attacking them with all the means he could control. His pamphlets and ' Con- siderations ' were some of the first sketches of Indian affairs to reach the British public and to set aflame the blaze of a prejudiced indignation from which Britons seem more prone to suffer, and to suffer more violently than their neighbours, and which, inflamed by monetary losses, reached its crisis of injustice in the attack upon Warren Hastings. Nothing comes out more clearly in this Life than the difficulties which beset the Company's 1 See ante. xxx. 28-41.
