His abstinence from the passing topics of Parliamentary controversy obtained for him a friendly, as well as an attentive, hearing from both sides of the House whenever he spoke on his own subjects; and did much to smooth the progress of those immense and salutary reforms with which the Cabinet had resolved to accompany the renewal of the India Company's Charter.
So rapid had been the march of events under that strange imperial system established in the East by the enterprise and valour of three generations of our countrymen, that each of the periodical revisions of that system was, in effect, a revolution.

The legislation of 1813 destroyed the monopoly of the Indian trade.

In 1833 the time had arrived when it was impossible any longer to maintain the monopoly of the China trade; and the extinction of this remaining commercial privilege could not fail to bring upon the Company commercial ruin.

Skill, and energy, and caution, however happily combined, would not enable rulers who were governing a population larger than that governed by Augustus, and making every decade conquests more extensive than the conquests of Trajan, to compete with private merchants in an open market.

England, mindful of the inestimable debt which she owed to the great Company, did not intend to requite her benefactors by imposing on them a hopeless task.