THE RESTORATION ERA 43 
tion here by the sword.” The East India Company, 
when Mun wrote, did not own a square foot of Indian 
soil. Their first territorial possession, the site of 
Fort St. George at Madras, was not rented until 
1639-40, and the island of Bombay had yet to be 
acquired as part of the dowry of the Portuguese 
btide of Chatles II, being ceded to the English 
Crown in 1661, and handed over by the King to the 
Company by the charter of March 27, 1669. As 
merchants, no more and no less, the Company were 
jealous monopolists in India, unrelenting to English 
interlopers, as they styled those of their countrymen 
who attempted to trade in Indian seas without becom- 
ing members of the Company ; but their interests as 
importers into England of Indian articles, some of 
which competed or threatened to compete with home 
products, inclined them to free trade in respect of 
imports and made them also early opponents of the 
widespread and long-lived fallacy that a country is 
impoverished by sending money out of it. “It is not 
therefore the keeping of our money in the kingdom, 
but the necessity and use of our wares in foreign 
countries, and our want of their commodities that 
causeth the vent and consumption on all sides which 
makes 2 quick and ample trade’! In the East Indies 
the Dutch were savagely exclusive in regard to other 
Europeans, and, at the time when Mun wrote, had the 
taint of the Amboyna massacre attaching to them, but 
in the Netherlands they kept, and by the nature and 
limited extent of their homeland were forced to keep, 
open or nearly open ports, and down to the time of 
1 Mun, pp. 42~3.