given by the Crown to the London Company for fifteen years. This deed of incorporation stands as a historic monument, commemorating the inception of a great enterprise; it records the origin and indicates the direction of that great current of Asiatic trade whose ever rising flow during three centuries has brought wealth and power to the English nation.
At this period, moreover, the common right of all nations to trade freely and peacefully with Asia, though it was asserted by the Dutch as against the Spanish monopoly, was in fact no more recognized than a common international right to cultivate or colonize. Each country was striving to seize and appropriate the largest possible share of this profitable commerce, to the forcible exclusion of all interlopers; they were all contending for complete and masterful possession; they were conquering by water as they might be conquering by land, and fiercely attacking any intruder upon their trading ground as if he were an invader of their territory.
At the end of the sixteenth century the Spaniards claimed the whole right of trade with the East Indies as part of their sovereignty; the Indian seas were their territorial waters; they permitted no European port except their own to exist upon the Indian seaboard. "The Indies," they declared, "East and West, are our house, privately possessed by us for more than a hundred years; and no one has a right to enter without our permission;" they claimed over these vast regions the same sovereign jurisdiction that England affirms
