FROM A DOUBLE STANDARD TO A SILVER STANDARD 357
Rs. 15, became overvalued, and the Government which was at one time eager to receive gold, was alarmed at its influx. By adopting the course it did of declaring gold no longer legal tender, and yet undertaking to receive it in liquidation of Government demands, it laid itself under the disadvantage of being open to be embarrassed with a coin which was of no use and must ordinarily have been paid for above its value. Realizing its position, it left aside all considerations of augmenting revenue by increased coinage, and promptly issued on December 25, 1852, another Proclamation withdrawing that of 1841. Whether it would not have been better to have escaped the embarrassment by making gold general legal tender than depriving it of its partial legal-tender power is another matter. But, in so far as India was saved the trials and tribulations undergone by the bimetallic countries to preserve the silver part of their currency, the abrogation of bimetallism was by no means a small advantage. For, the measure had the virtue of fore-arming the country against changes which, though not seen at the time, soon made themselves felt.
The abrogation of bimetallism in India, accomplished by the Act of 1835, cannot therefore be made a ground for censure. But it is open to argument that a condemnation of bimetallism is not per se a justification of silver monometallism. If it was to be monometallism it might well have been gold monomentallism. In fact, the preference for silver monometallism is not a little odd when it is recalled that Lord Liverpool, the advocate of monometallism,* whose doctrines the Court had sought to apply to India, had prescribed gold monometallism for similar currency evils then prevalent in England. That the Court should have deviated from their guide in this particular has naturally excited a great deal of hostile comment as to the propriety of this grave departure.† At the outset any appeal to ulterior motives must be baseless, for Lord Liverpool was not a “gold bug,” nor was the Court composed of “silver men.” As a matter of fact, neither of them at all considered the question from the standpoint as to which was a better standard of value, gold or silver. Indeed, in so far as that was at all a consideration worth attending to, the choice of the Court, according to the opinion of the time, was undoubetdly a better one than that of Lord
- The author of A Treatise on the Coinage of the Realm was anticipated by Sir John Shore, the Governor of Bengal, in his Minute, op . cit., par 55.
† Cf. H. M. Dunning, Indian Currency, 1898, passim; also S. V. Doraiswami, op. cit., passim.