THE NEW ATTACK ON THE EAST INDIAN TRADE 463 
opponents’ complaint, “a Knack of writing very plausibly, AD 15 
and they who employed him and furnished him with ’ 
Materials, had the Command of all the publick Papers in 
the Custom House, he had it in his Power to do a great 
deal of Mischief, among such as were unskilled in Trade, 
and at the same Time very fond of French Wine, which 
it was then a great Crime to be against.” The antagonists 
of France, however, started an opposition paper named the 
British Merchant, which came out twice a week?; several 
leading merchants were among its contributors, and they 
were practically successful, for the Methuen Treaty was 
maintained, and no effect was given to the commercial 
clauses of the treaty with France. Trade between the two and this 
countries was carried on, under scarcely altered conditions, i omg 
for more than eighty years after the signing of the Methuen Sone? 4% 
Treaty, until the dominant policy was at last reversed, with 
Adam Smith’s approval, under the guiding hand of Pitt®, 
221. The reasoning which brought about the interrup- The same 
Lion of the French trade in 1678 gave rise to a new agitation es 
against the East India Company and its operations. In the te ge 
early seventeenth century the export trade of this Company India Co. 
had been the chief subject of attack, as they were so much 
in the habit of sending silver to the East. The fiercest 
opposition, in the period of Whig ascendancy, was directed 
against their import trade; since the goods they brought 
from the East, served as substitutes for textile fabrics woven 
in England. It was alleged that Indian muslins and silks 
interfered with the demand for English goods in the home 
market, and prevented the export of English manufactures 
bo foreign countries. The Act of 1663, which permitted 
the exportation of bullion without a license, gave a great 
impulse to the East India trade; but the Company con- 
1 King, British Merchant, 1. p. x. 
2 This controversy incidentally raised the question as to the alleged superiority 
of English wool (see p. 504 n. 7, below). Defoe argued in the Mercator that 
England had such an advantage from the character of the raw material available, 
hat she could, by restraining the export of wool, secure to her manufacturers a 
monopoly of the markets of the world. “This extraordinary assertion put the 
British Merchant under the necessity of showing the real circumstance of England 
n regard to wool”; this * jury of the most eminent English merchants” held that 
the French manufacturers had access to ample supplies from other quarters. 
Smith. Chronicon. 11. 109 n. and 117. 3 See p. 602 below.