360 COMMERCIAL DESCRIPTION OF lity, confidence, and free trade, will, it may be pre- dicted, reduce, in time, the export price to about six Spanish dollars the picul. A cargo, laid in at nine Spanish dollars per picul, sells in England at the rate of 17iu'u per picul, or an advance of 92 per cent., and pays the exorbitant and unprecedented impost of 2s. 6d. per pound, or 328 per cent. In China, the same investment sells at an advance of about 90 per cent., and in Bengal at 108^ per cent., including 10 per cent, duties. The people of England pay for the pepper they consume 332 per cent, more than the Chinese ; 294<2 per cent, more than the people of Bengal ; and 296 per cent, more than the Americans, who pay only a duty of eight cents of a dollar in the pound. The character of the European intercourse with India, in the different periods of the trade, is illus- trated in a most interesting manner, by directing our attention to the history of the pepper trade, of which I shall therefore give a short review. This may be divided into five periods, viz. that early one in which the commodities of the East were con- veyed by the numerous channels which I have de- scribed in another chapter — that in which the Por- tuguese principally supplied the market — the short period, during which there was an equal competi- tion in the market between the nations of Europe —the period of the close monopoly — and, lastly, the period of the present free trade. Pepper was
