38 "DAT. 



to confer rights by charter on trading companies, or to annul 

 them. Thus the privileges of the Hanseatic League in London 

 were be continued, or suspended by the charters or 



proclamations of successive sovereigns, till the Alderman and 

 chants of the Steelyard were finally extinguished by 

 Kli/.abeth. The Russian and the Levant Company, the East 

 India, the Hudson's Bay, the African Companies were created 

 by royal charters; and apparently for a long time the 

 authority of the Crown in granting these monopolies was 

 unchallenged. But when, especially in the case of the East 

 India Company, the profits of the trade were very great, and 

 huge fortunes were soon piled up by the lucky shareholders, 

 and the Company became a power in the state, and even in 

 Parliament, attempting successfully to corrupt members of the 

 legislature and to shape the policy of ministers, it was 

 impossible to prevent interlopers, and inexpedient to permit 

 these chartered companies to exercise high judicial powers over 

 British subjects. They too who were excluded from the 

 India trade, because they were unqualified, began to argue 

 that no power except that of Parliament could limit the 

 mercantile rights of Englishmen. The growing feeling on 

 the subject of these chartered companies is early illustrated 

 by the action of the House of Lords in Skinner's case against 

 the East India Company, in which the Lords took a line which 

 was afterwards accepted ; though it may be well doubted 

 whether they were justified in entertaining Skinner's complaint 

 and enforcing their jurisdiction by fine and imprisonment. 



In 1698, Montague made the exigency of a loan the plea 

 for creating a New East India Company with a parliamentary 

 title, and thereby to confer on it a legal monopoly. I shall 

 comment on this Act in a later part of this work. 



But the capital venture of parliamentary action after the 

 Revolution was the creation of the Bank of England in 1694. 

 At first the law merely gave the subscribers to a government 

 loan the privilege of carrying on a joint stock bank. But 

 less than three years later, the Legislature conferred on a 



