358 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
Liverpool. Not only were all the theorists, such as Locke, Harris, and Petty, in favour of silver as the standard of value, but the practice of the whole world was also in favour of silver. No doubt, England had placed herself on a gold basis in 1816. But that Act, far from closing the English Mint to the free coinage of silver, left it to be opened by a Royal Proclamation.* The Proclamation, it is true, was never issued, but it is not to be supposed that therefore Englishmen of the time had regarded the question of the standard as a settled issue. The crisis of
1825 showed that the gold standard furnished too narrow a basis for the English currency system to work smoothly, and, in the expert opinion of the time,† the gold standard, far from being the cause of England’s commercial superiority, was rather a hindrance to her prosperity, as it cut her off from the rest of the world, which was mostly on a silver basis. Even the British statesmen of the time had no decided preference for the gold standard. In 1826, Huskisson actually proposed that Government should issue silver certificates of full legal tender.‡ Even as late as 1844 the question of the standard was far from being settled, for we find Peel, in his Memorandum§ to the Cabinet, discussing the possibility of abandoning the gold standard in favour of the silver or a bimetallic standard without any compunction or predilection one way or the other. The difficulties of fiscal isolation were evidently not so insuperable as to compel a change of the standard, but they were great enough to force Peel to introduce his famous proviso embodying the Huskisson plan in part in the Bank Charter Act of 1844, permitting the issue of notes against silver to the extent of onefourth of the total issues.¶ Indeed, so great was the universal faith in the stability of silver that Holland changed in 1847 from what was practically a gold monometallism§§ to silver monometallism because her statesmen believed that
“it had proved disastrous to the commercial and industrial
- Cf. Dana Horton, The Silver Pound, 1887, p. 161.
† Cf. the evidence of A. Baring (afterwards Lord Ashuburton) before the Committee for Coin (1828), H. of C. Return 31 of 1830.
‡ See his Memorandum to the Cabinet printed by Gibbs, A Colloquy on Currency (1894), Appendix, p. xlvii.
§ For which, see Andreades, History of the Bank of England, Supplement I.
¶ For the original purpose of this defunct proviso, see Peel’s Speech on the Bank Charter Act, dated May 20, 1844, Hansard, Vol. LXXIV, pp. 1334-35.
§§ In theory Holland had adopted bimetallism in 1816. But the legal ratio of 15.873 to 1 had undervalued silver so much that it had made gold the chief circulating medium of Holland.