most respected states of Europe, has been thus wrested from the short usurpation of the French government, added to the dominion of the British crown, and converted, from a seat of hostile machination and commercial competition, into an augmentation of British power and prosperity.' A multitude of reflexions crowd upon us, suggested by this consoling paragraph in the dispatch of the Captain General of India. It brings to our recollection the rapid strides by which the commerce and dominion of the Indian islands conducted the states of Holland to a pitch of wealth and grandeur and power almost unexampled in the history of nations. It reminds us of the wanton and tyrannical abuse of that power; of the base ingratitude of those states to the nation by whose disinterested aid it was attained; and of the causes which led to its decline and final overthrow. It suggests, moreover, to our consideration, how far and in what manner the conquest of the Dutch settlements in India, but more particularly those in the great eastern archipelago, usually called by the Dutch the Groot Oost, can lead to 'an augmentation of British power and prosperity.' More than a century before the Dutch name was known in India, the Portugueze had astonished the European world with their daring enterprizes, and brilliant conquests in the east. Urged on by the same kind of zeal which conducted our heroes to the holy wars, and prompted by a more encouraging prospect of wealth and dominion, their success, in establishing their religion, language, and commerce, among the most enlightened and powerful nations of Asia, was as rapid as extraordinary. In those days Lisbon became the great mart for the commodities of the east. The produce and manufactures of China and Japan, of Siam, Cambodia, and Malacca, of the whole coast of Malabar, Persia and Arabia, Melinda, Soffala, and of the great and populous islands which form the oriental archipelago, were all transported to the shores of the Tagus. So quick an advancement to wealth and power led, as quickly, to indolence and luxury. The natives were oppressed to support the profusion and extravagance of their new governors, and persecuted by the monks for their religious prejudices. The officers and inerchants abandoned themselves to those voluptuous excesses so well understood in a tropical climate, left all their concerns to the management of slaves, and, in the course of two generations, the successors of Vasco de Gama had become a degenerate and effeminate race, corrupted in mind and body by every species of vice and debauchery. There was wanting, besides, some systematic arrangement, some bond of union, between the mother country and the colonies. Wealth flowed into Lisbon 'they knew not why and cared not wherefore;' but, at the time when the favours of Portu gal were bestowed on the Brazils, and its revenues exhausted in the struggles with Spain, the current suddenly stopped. The Portugueze government, then, for the first time, began to experience the fatal consequences of not having adopted some system of security for those sources of wealth which the sagacity of their countrymen had discovered, and their valour and enterprize acquired. It was not to be expected that these treasures would long remain concealed from, or unmolested by, the rest of Europe. Holland and Zealand, from a train of favourable circumstances, and under the protection of England, had raised to some importance the United Provinces as a free and independent state in Europe. By industry and frugality their fishing-busses were increased to tradingvessels, and their trade produced a navy to protect it. At the close of the sixteenth century, they began to push their commercial speculations into the Indian seas; and their first attempt was crowned with complete success. An East India Company was immediately established and invested with extraordinary powers by the statesgeneral. They conferred on it the privilege of making peace or war with the sovereigns of the east, of erecting establishments, building forts, appointing governors, entering into alliances, &c. They sent large fleets into the eastern seas; and their first exploits, in return for the protection and support which they had received from the English government at home, were, by intrigue and violence, to drive its mercantile subjects from their infant establishments abroad; expelling them by force from some of their factories, and rendering them, in others, odious to the natives, by accusations as false as they were scandalous. England, in fact, at the commencement of the seventeenth century, had scarcely felt the conviction that wealth was the great source of power, and that colonies and plantations, and consequently foreign commerce, contributed largely to the strength and security of the mother country. Though her fleets of war never failed to beat the De Ruyters and Van Tromps at home, the Van Necks and Van Hagens were far superior to her mercantile marine abroad. We had an East India Company, it is true, with an exclusive charter; but it was at that time scarcely a national concern, and its limited capital, exclusively employed in trade, could scarcely be deemed worthy the attention of its more ambitious rivals. The splendid establishments of the Portugueze were the game which principally attracted the avarice of the Dutch. Those enfeebled descendants of a race of heroes, whom the vices and luxuries of a warm climate had enervated and debased, were wholly unable to resist the unwearied and persevering energies of the Dutch; who captured or destroyed their trading-vessels wherever they met with them, and applied the produce of their cargoes, in part, to the raising raising and paying of native troops, with the aid of whom they attacked and carried the Portugueze settlements. We have seen in a preceding article* in what manner they succeeded in rooting the Portugueze out of Japan, and forming an establishment for themselves, on which they have continued to the present day. Hither, in two annual ships, they carried from Batavia a few European cloths, silks, printed cottons, sugar, logwood, drugs and trinkets, for which, in return, they brought away copper, wrought silks, lacquered ware, porcelaine, and gold in ingots. In China they were less successful. They endeavoured to establish themselves on Aimoy on the coast of Fokien, on the Pescadores, and on the great island of Formosa, from all of which they were successively expelled by the Chinese. Batavia and Bantam had long been in their possession, and they had driven the Portugueze from the more eastern settlement of Timor; but the rich and populous empire of China, 'the vast field it opened for their commercial speculations with Tonquin, Siam, Pegu, and Malacca, inflamed their avarice, and induced them to send a splendid embassy with valuable presents to Pekin, in 1655. At first they were received with due consideration by the Tartar monarch; but the famous jesuit, Adam Schall, who had long been a favourite at court, and whose hatred of heretics was unbounded, represented them in so bad a light to the emperor, mere pedlars and pirates,' without law or religion, who by their intrigues and cruelties had established themselves in various parts of the east, and expelled the lawful and native princes, that they were speedily dismissed. To do away the effect of the impression made in China, and which they were aware would spread by the annual junks of this nation which visited Batavia, they prevailed on the sovereigns of Java and the neighbouring islands to send ambassadors to the Prince of Orange, which, while it flattered the pride of the Stadtholder, might impose on the credulity of the simple orientals. Five sons of princes were also sent to be educated in Holland, and brought up in the principles of the Christian religion. Their early attention had been drawn to the spice trade of the Moluccas, which, in the latter part of the sixteenth and in the beginning of the seventeenth century, was in the possession of the Spaniards and Portugueze. They determined on expelling them from those valuable settlements, which they effected without much difficulty, but not without a considerable slaughter both of Europeans and natives. But the nutmeg and the clove were produced in such abundance, in the whole group of islands, as greatly to diminish their value; they, therefore, bribed the princes of Ternate and Art. II. of the present Number. Tidor, of manners were now exchanged for parade and profusion; their wealth, accumulated by a frugality bordering on avarice, was employed in the purchase of luxuries, while indolence usurped the place of industry. The splendor and magnificence of their Governor-Generals, their directors and counsellors of India, were unbounded, and all the inferior officers followed the example of their superiors. To check this extravagance, the Directors, at home, passed sumptuary decrees, by which their feasts and their funerals, their weddings, christenings, carriages, &c. were to be regulated. Some idea may be formed of this profusion from the following passages in one of their codes, drawn up so late as the year 1764. 'Ladies whose husbands are below the rank of counsellors of India, are not allowed to wear at one time jewels exceeding the value of 6,000 rix-dollars; wives of senior merchants are restricted to four thousand, others to three and one thousand according to their rank. Ladies of the upper ranks are permitted to appear in public with three female attendants, who may wear car-rings of middle sized diamonds, gold hair-pins, petticoats of golden, silver or silken cloth, jackets of golden or silver gauze, chains of gold, or beads and girdles of gold, but neither pearls, nor diamonds, nor any other kind of jewels in the hair. Wives of inferior merchants may have two, and ladies of inferior rank, one attendant, who may wear ear-rings of small diamonds, gold hair-pins, a jacket of fine linen and a chintz petticoat, but no gold nor silver stuffs, nor silks, jewels, real or artificial pearls, nor any ornaments of gold.' In addition to these regulations, commissioners were sent out to curtail the salaries and allowances of the company's servants; but this measure, instead of affording a remedy, tended only to increase the evil. Men who had been accustomed to profusion and extravagance, who were doomed to pass their days in a distant and unhealthy climate, and who had no enjoyment beyond the momentary gratifications of the sensual appetites, were not to be brought back to habits of frugality and temperance by the edicts of a tem, porary commission: their salaries, it is true, were easily curtailed; but they made good the deficiency by plundering their employers. One great operating cause, however, of the decline of Dutch prosperity in the east, must be ascribed to the growing power of the English in that quarter. The greatest capital will at all times turn the current of trade in its favour. The English capital was almost wholly vested in commercial speculations; a great part of that of the Dutch, as we have seen, was diverted into other channels. There was besides a kind of infatuation in the councils of that nation. The French were at all times their natural enemies; yet the French, in their recent recent wars with England, contrived to draw the Dutch into their alliance thus their fleets, and their foreign settlements, almost invariably fell into our hands. The latter, it is true, were generally restored at a peace; but the capital was wanting to render them productive. The fortunes of individuals in Holland were, for the most part, involved in trade, so that whatever affected their commerce, and their colonies, was instantly felt as a national calamity. Still, however, she maintained a respectable character till forced to take part with France in the American war, which she forfeited altogether on the bursting out of the Revolution. Corrupted by French emissaries at an early point of this baneful era, the infatuated people of Holland clamoured for liberty which they already had, and obtained slavery unknown to them before. Their fate was now no longer doubtful. From the moment they deserted their prince, and betrayed the allies whom they had called to their assistance, the grass began to spring in the streets of Amsterdam. Her best citizens were glad to escape from a country where the merchants' were no longer princes,' nor the traders, the honorable of the earth.' Her ships of war, her rich merchantmen, her foreign possessions successively slipped from her grasp; and that awful prophecy, which foretold the ruin of the city of Tyre, so similar in all the circumstances of its rapid rise to wealth and grandeur, its decline and fall, to that of Amsterdam, was once more on the eve of being fulfilled. Thy riches and thy fairs, thy merchandize, thy mariners and thy pilots, thy caulkers, and the occupiers of thy merchandize, and all thy men of war that are in thee, and all thy company which are in the midst of thee, shall fall into the midst of the seas, on the day of thy ruin.' They have fallen! May her example serve as a warning, and her conduct as a lesson of instruction, to the united company of British merchants trading to the East Indies; and to the rulers of the British Empire, by whose aid and protection that company has acquired its present elevation! The rapid sketch which we have drawn of the Dutch acquisitions in the east, will serve in some degree to shew the extent of what we have gained by their loss. In fact, we have gained every thing. We stand indeed on a much higher eminence than the Dutch ever reached; but in one respect, our situation is similar to that in which they once found themselves--we have nothing farther to acquire. We must not, however, estimate our gains by their losses. It would not be politic, it is not, perhaps, practicable, to occupy the ground from which they have been driven. We need no new establishments in the East: many of those we have are cumbrous and expensive; but they are more than ever necessary for the maintenance of our commercial superiority. The capital expended on them indeed, very far exceeds that which is employed in traffic; |