THE RESTORATION ERA. . . 33 
1670 in the Preface to the Reader of his “Discoutse of 
Trade’! As we have seen, he objected to plantations 
as having, in his opinion, damaged English trade, but 
for a similar reason he equally objected to navigation 
acts and to the monopolies secured by chartered com- 
panies. He was an out and out free trader. Though 
defending the navigation acts, Child also, like the 
leaders of the East India Company generally, had 
strong leanings to free trade so far as concerned im- 
ports from India into England. In the case of India 
the advantages or disadvantages of colonisation did 
not arise ; trade had it all its own way. ‘The twenty 
years, 1660-80,” we are told, ‘ may be regarded as 
the golden age of the [East India] Company while 
still a non-political, non-territorial trading body.” 2 
As merchants, unembarrassed by territorial liabilities 
and in full favour of the Crown—for the King himself 
was a shareholder—they acquired immense wealth, of 
which a vivid account has been given by Macaulay in 
the eighteenth chapter of his history, Child being a 
byword for the amount of his riches and for the 
ostentation with which they were displayed. A bene- 
ficiary of the Company in a modest way was John 
Evelyn, who tells us in his diary that in 1657 he invested 
Lsoo in their stock and twenty-five years later, in 
1682, sold out £250 for £750. Up to this time, in 
the modern history of England there had been no 
such profits from traffic across the ocean to and from 
East or West ; India gave birth to modern capitalism 
L Roger Coke, ut sup., p. 32, etc. 
* An Historical Geography of the British Dependencies, vol. vii, India, 
by P. E. Roberts, Patt I, p. 41.