168 THE COMPANY AND THE KING pillars " who lived at ease in England, and the " labori- ous bees " in the East who " bring the honey to the hive." Nor did the public take seriously his metaphor, which was destined to prove so true, of the Company as a" Hercules yet in the cradle." We must, indeed, distinguish between the young Sir Dudley Digges of 1615 dabbling in the City, and the mature Sir Dudley Digges who stood forth for the Commons in the im- peachment of Buckingham, and gave voice to the nation on the Petition of Right. Yet Sir Dudley Digges of the East India Company, under the first Stuart king, came near to the principles by which Sir Dudley North of the Turkey Company, under the last Stuarts, antici- pated the doctrines of Adam Smith. In the case alike of the earlier and the later Sir Dudley, the actual facts of our Eastern commerce supplied the basis for sounder economics. Thomas Mun's " Discourse of Trade," in 1621, formed by far the ablest statement of the case on behalf of the adventurers. But to his contemporaries Mun appeared as a wealthy director of the Company, who was rewarded for his advocacy by the offer of the inspectorship of its factories in India. His arguments were in advance of the age, and as we shall find them reiterated in the Company's petition to Parliament in 1628, I need not pause over them here. On the public they had little effect. The Company still continued to be the Jason that had stolen away England's golden fleece of bullion. " The, clamorous complaints," which induced Mun to come forward in its defence, continued
