overstocked and the cargo unsaleable. The trader's career in the East was a series of dramatic ups and downs. A run of luck would leave him a wealthy man; a bad voyage might eat up half his fortune. Beneath the poetic heightening of Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice' there lay a solid basis of common experience; and few of the Company's servants made large fortunes, not because normal profits were small, but because trade was desperately speculative and the life of Europeans in the East was short.

If in its financial organisation the Dutch Company offered the English a useful but unheeded lesson, so also the Dutch might with advantage have imitated the policy which the English finally adopted towards private trade. The Dutch directors were wholly uncompromising on this head. It was the great sin, a violation of the Company's universal monopoly. They aimed at engrossing not only the trade to and from the Indies but also the port-to-port trade in the Indies; and they clung to this ideal to the end with but a few trivial relaxations. But the effect of all their regulations was merely to make the private trade of their servants a secret matter; and the more illicit it became, the worse influence it had upon the characters of the Dutch in the East. The English showed themselves readier to learn by experience. At first, like the Dutch, they absolutely forbade private trade. Then they allowed it within certain limits. Then they again forbade it. But they found it impossible to carry their orders into effect. The quarrel between the Company's naval and mercantile services among other things brought to light curious and instructive examples of private trade. Now a captain refuses to take on board for the Company's account goods which he had been willing to buy and ship on his own; now the factors are accused of lending the sailors money and sharing in their gains. The Company does its best by threats and revilings, by stringent orders and royal proclamations, to prevent its growth. It orders wages to be paid as much as possible in kind, so as to reduce the supply of private funds, forgetting that native merchants could generally be found to advance money. Gradually, however, the Company came to see that it was attempting the impossible. It

would not be able to man its ships if it resolutely confiscated all the private trade that came aboard. It took to purchasing the goods it desired and charging freight on the rest. When a factor died in India leaving money which he could only have amassed in private trade, it entered into a composition with his relatives for a share. An understanding grew up, which afterwards hardened into a definite rule, that the factors might follow the port-to-port trade in India, but were not to meddle with the Company's European trade. Hence sprang up a traffic of some importance, giving employment to many English sailors besides Thomas Bowrey.

Nor was private trade the only matter in which the English Company compares favourably with the Dutch. The natural preoccupation of a trading company is profit; but, when it finds itself in such a position as circumstances forced upon the English and Dutch Companies, it does well if it avoids confining its attention so exclusively to profit as to neglect the administration of its servants abroad. The English Company at times was certainly guilty of regarding its dividends when other matters might well have been considered; but on the whole it erred less in this respect than did its great rival. For instance, it kept a keen eye upon its presidents, and never allowed succession to the Chair to become a matter of routine. The Dutch did the same in the first half of the 17th century. Indeed, Coen, Van Dieman and Maetsuycker were men of conspicuous abilities. But the corruption which grew and spread among the Dutch Directors weakened their hold upon the management and policy of their servants in the East; and, before long, accession to the highest posts became not much more than a matter of seniority. This defect was due to corruption in the Directorate; and that again was largely due to the peculiar constitution of the Company, in which, as James Mill would have said, the oligarchic elements far outweighed all the rest. It was responsible to no authority save the StatesGeneral, one of the feeblest bodies that have ever pretended to exercise sovereign rights. Moreover, there was nothing that corresponded to the English Courts of Proprietors which could always revise the Directors' action. A Dutch stock-holder could do nothing save sell

his stock; and his influence over the choice of Directors was negligible.

6

I then, we compare the East India Company with similar contemporary organisations, it does not suffer much by the comparison; and modern research seems to be steadily disproving the thesis which James Mill set out to prove in his History of British India.' Indeed, it is high time that his version should be replaced by one more accurate. He accuses his predecessors of error, but he himself is untrustworthy. He complains of Bruce's 'alacrity of advocation' while himself displaying a remarkable alacrity of abuse. According to him the Company could do nothing right. Its commerce was ill-managed; its Directors were corrupt; they needlessly multiplied factories to add to their patronage; the King's subjects were imprisoned and flogged to death though guiltless. Had there been no Company, he seems to say, our intercourse with the East would have been unstained by crime. That in one sense is perfectly true, for there would have been no intercourse either to stain with crime or to illuminate with heroism. Intercourse and crime alike would have fallen to the French or the Dutch. But, now that privileges and Company have vanished, and can no longer arouse the passions of self-interest, everyone should be willing to admit that it was conducted by men who were neither fools nor knaves, but exceedingly human, wise with the wisdom of their day but not endowed with the preternatural power of guiding their conduct according to the principles and theories of later generations. At times they were foolish and short-sighted; at times they professed and acted on principles which seem to us vicious and untrue; but we, who take infinitely more thought for the morrow than was possible in the 17th century, and yet often see our calculations falsified and our hopes disappointed, may surely recognise a conditional element in wisdom, and refrain from hastily condemning methods and theories which seemed justified in their own day, and for which a wider knowledge of contemporary conditions will not unfrequently provide a satisfactory defence.

H. DODWELL.

Art. 5.-THE MYSTERIES OF MITHRAS.

1. Tectes et monuments figurés relatifs aux mystères de Mithra. Vol. 1, Introduction; Vol. II, Texts, &c. By Franz Cumont. Brussels: Lamertin, 1896-1899.

2. Les mystères de Mithra. By Franz Cumont. Third edition. Brussels: Lamertin, 1913.

3. Eine Mithrasliturgie. By Albert Dieterich. Second edition, with additions, by Richard Wünsch. Leipzig and Berlin: Teubner, 1909.

4. The Religious Life of Ancient Rome. By J. B. Carter. London: Constable, 1911.

And other works.

IN days when Mithras was a less familiar figure than he has since become, Renan wrote that, if Christianity had been arrested in its growth by some mortal sickness, the world would have been Mithraist'; and, if this be thought a paradox, we may at least agree with Dieterich † that Mithraism was the most serious rival faced and conquered by Christianity.

M. Franz Cumont, to whom students of comparative religion in general and of Mithraism in particular owe an incalculable debt, was but twenty-eight years old when the first volume of his 'Textes et monuments figurés relatifs aux mystères de Mithra'-a classic of research, if ever book deserved the name-was published in 1896, to be followed three years later by a second, described as an an Introduction critique,' but really an exhaustive historical study of the religion of Mithras. It needs but a glance at the collection of texts and monuments to show that we have here a signal example of the light which archæological discovery throws upon the dark places of our historical and literary record. The texts-Greek, Latin, and Oriental -in which Mithras is named, bulk small beside the six hundred inscriptions set up by his worshippers and the sculptured monuments found in his sanctuaries; and it is to these, in the main, that we owe our knowledge, not only of the geographical diffusion of Mithraism, but also of the symbols and trappings of the cult and-in many

essential features-the doctrine which they enshrined. For those who cannot afford to study these monuments at first hand, M. Cumont's smaller book, the latest edition of which brings into account the fresh material discovered down to the year 1913, gives an excellent summary of the whole subject.

The cult of Mithras has a long history, but it was only in its latest phase that it acquired the profound significance which enabled it to aspire and almost attain to the dignity of a universal religion. That Mithras was worshipped in primitive times by the undivided Indo-Iranian people is clearly proved by the fact that his name appears in the Vedas as well as in the Avesta ; and, although his rank in the Vedic pantheon was never pre-eminent, his visible manifestation in the heavenly light and his moral attributes as the upholder of truth and justice are the same in both religions. Moreover, the recently discovered cuneiform tablets of Boghaz-Keui have revealed the striking fact that in the fifteenth century B.C. Northern Mesopotamia was inhabited by an Indo-Iranian people, known to their neighbours as Mitanni, who were worshippers of Mithras together with other Vedic divinities such as Varuna and Indra. There is, however, no sign that the specific doctrines of the Iranian religion, associated with the name of Zoroaster, had taken shape at so early a date; and it was his connexion with this system of beliefs that enabled Mithras to enter upon his triumphant career.

This is not the place to examine the difficult problems connected with the origins of Zoroastrianism and the dating of its sacred books; it must suffice to say that by the time of the Achæmenid dynasty we find the dualistic system, in which Ahura the Wise takes the place of Varuna as the upholder of law and order both in the physical and in the moral world, established, with its priesthood and its liturgy, as the religion of the Persian State. The conception of the world-process as a struggle, in nature between Light and Darkness, in man between good and evil-strangely blended, in the early texts, with half-historical, half-symbolical allusions to the ancient strife between Iran and Turan, the Sown and the Wild-was of course the most profound and fruitful of the ideas of Zoroaster; and the world is not likely