tageous, although it occasioned an annual export of bullion in the first instance, is that which we carried on with China and the East Indies. Besides goods and merchandises, we sent yearly to those countries between four and five hundred thousand pounds in money; but then, besides that there were some of our imports thence, such as saltpetre, pepper, and a few drugs, which perhaps we could not well do without, we re-exported all the silks and stained calicoes we brought home, the use of these articles being prohibited in England; and even of the white calicoes and muslins, of the coffee, tea, pepper, saltpetre, and other goods we procured by our East India and China trade, very great quantities were also re-exported, and for much more money than all that we sent to the East. "The consequence is," concludes our author, "that our treasure is not exhausted by that trade, since we have those goods in exchange for our money as procure us much greater sums from other countries, and since our whole loss is more than repaired by exporting part only of those goods at a much higher price than we paid for the whole."[1] This reasoning, however, would not have been deemed satisfactory by many political economists of the day—by Pollexfen and others, for instance, who still maintained that the East India trade was in reality little else than an exchange for useless and even pernicious luxuries of the only true wealth, and, as it were, the very life-blood of the kingdom; but some of the writers in the British Merchant were probably concerned in that trade, and members of the now comparatively flourishing company by which it was carried on. The United East India Company had resumed the payment of their dividends in 1709, first at the rate of only five per cent; but it was raised to eight in the latter part of the same year, soon after to nine, and, at last, in September, 1711, to ten per cent.[2]
A curious illustration of the value of the Turkey trade is afterwards given in an account of the manufacture of 100 broad-cloths, and their export to and sale in that
- ↑ British Merchant, i. 26.
- ↑ Macpherson's European Com. with India, p. 168.
