The habit of conducting colonial ventures by great chartered companies lent itself very easily to the promotion of international quarrels. Rival traders who had the command of an armed force were particularly likely to come to blows, when they enjoyed a position of semi-sovereignty, and were divided from all control on the part of their Government by a distance of thousands of miles. The check which even the Company itself could keep on its agents, when news took from six months to a year to reach home, and eighteen months or two years might pass before the superior's comment on the subordinate's actions could reach its destination at the other side of the world, was weak. The control of the State was illusory. It was first informed of the real or imaginary excesses of its subjects in a complaint from a foreign ambassador. It could not act without further evidence, which was not to be obtained till after months of delay, and was then sure to be vitiated by the partiality of the witness. Thus wars on a considerable scale could be carried on by trading companies. The motive was hardly ever wanting, since there were sure to be disputes as to the respective rights, possessions, and, as we should now say, spheres of influence of the parties. Even in our own time it has required all the infinitely greater power of the central Government to prevent collisions between bodies of adventurers in remote regions. Sometimes the central Government has acted too late. In the seventeenth century the utmost good-will on the part of the States General and the Crown of England could hardly have availed to avert conflict between Englishmen and Dutchmen, on the West Coast of Africa and in the more remote Spice Islands. When national sentiment was loud in favour of the adventurers on one side, a collision was inevitable. There can be no question that sentiment in England was strongly hostile to the Dutch. If the king was disposed to promote a war with the United Provinces, he was certainly well supported by his subjects. The complaints of the merchants who considered themselves aggrieved by the Dutch were favourably listened to by the House of Commons. Both Houses joined in an address to the king, calling on him to take vengeance for the wrongs done by the Dutch to English traders. The amount of the injury was put at the certainly enormously exaggerated figure of seven or eight hundred thousand pounds.