APPENDIX I from only Bristol and Exeter; and there seemed no likelihood of money being obtained from that source. The Assada Merchants having barely the funds to carry on their own business, could furnish but little to the new Joint Stock. With such sums as its own exhausted members were able to subscribe, the Company strug- gled on. How hard was the struggle abundantly appears in the records. The continued existence of the Company depended not on the continuity of its trade or on its sending out a yearly succession of ships. As long as it elected in each July a governor and the other officers named in the charter of James I it preserved its exist- ence as a body corporate in the eye of the law. In July, 1651, the question arose whether it was worth while to keep up this formality. The General Court decided, however, to proceed with the election of officers, al- though " hereafter there will be little use of any gov- ernor, in regard they are to set no ships out, nor much other business but to pay their debts." The fact is that the union of the Company and the Assada Merchants failed to cope with the situation. For outside these societies a body of capitalists had grown up who protested against the monopoly of the India trade as a relic of the royal prerogative no longer suited to the times. They claimed that the Eastern traffic should either be organized on the Eegulated sys- tem, under which each member of a trade guild or asso- ciation might traffic on his own account, as in the Turkey Company, or that it should be thrown open to
