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.
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