That territorial expansion was not necessarily good business had been succinctly stated by Governor-General Jacob Mossel eight years before Hartingh: ‘What the lord spends, the merchant has to pay.’ In fact, concern about the price of territorial expansion had been voiced almost from the beginning, especially in the Board of Directors in Holland, witness Coenraad van Beuningen's analysis of the dual nature of the Company in 1684, in which he decried the territorial role of the Company as detrimental to its true function as a trading company. Also the underlying cause for the eventuel decline of the Company has by contemporaries as well as later observers often been blamed on this almost congenital defect of mixing trade and government in one body.