"necessitated the maintenance of forts, which only a joint-stock company could afford." Waddell states that there had been close collaboration between the company and Davenant and that he may have been compensated for writing it. He did go to great lengths to publish the pamphlet anonymously, and was apparently in a difficult financial position; Waddell therefore suggests that this was a work-for-hire and not necessarily something which Davenant actually supported. In 1712 Davenant published two Reports to the … Commissioners for … Public Accounts. Although these reports contained a large amount of statistical data, they continued the theme from "New Dialogues upon the Present Posture of Affairs" that Holland benefitted from trade with France while Britain took on heavy debt during the war with France and that trade with France "was or could be advantageous to England." This coincided with Jonathan Swift's Conduct of the Allies and provided the economic basis for peace and a commercial treaty with France. There is some question whether the Law of Demand was developed by Gregory King and then used in some of Charles Davenant's writings or whether King and Davenant jointly developed the idea based on King's statistical work and published their theory in Davenant's pamphlets. King does not describe a formal definition of the law in his journal, which is the primary source of his writings, and Davenant does not seem to be an innovative thinker and often wrote pamphlets to promote ideas or policies that would be beneficial to his personal economic or political status; therefore, it seems likely Davenant extended King's work to prove his claims that borrowing to fund the war was bad for England's economy and that excise taxes were the appropriate way to fund the government. Davenant is also credited with being the first to discuss the concept of Balance of Trade as being an important part of the financial health of a country. The foundation of the idea is that importing more goods than were exported would create an outflow of currency. He proposed in An Essay on Ways and Means of Supplying the War in 1695 that "export surplus was the best way to finance the war" as opposed to taking on long-term debt and increasing taxes on landowners. In 1696, Davenant wrote Essay on the East-India Trade, which continued the argument that imports should not be restricted because England was a net exporter of