THE SILVER STANDARD AND THE EVILS OF ITS INSTABILITY 437
fallen more, i.e. the price he received for his product was smaller than the outlay he had incurred. It is not quite established whether silver had fallen in Europe before it had fallen in India.* But even if that were so the possibility of a penalty through the fall of exchange proves that the bounty, it there was any, was not a bounty on the export trade as such, but was an outcome of the disharmony between the general level of prices and the prices of particular goods and services within the country, and would have existed even if the country had no export trade.
Thus the bounty was but an incident of the general depreciation of the currency. Its existence was felt because prices of all goods and services in India did not move in the same uniform manner. It is well known that at any one time prices of certain commodities will be rising, while the general price level is falling. On the other hand, certain goods will decline in price at the same time that the general price-level is rising. But such opposite movements are rare. What most often happens is that prices of some goods and services, though they move in the same direction, do not move at the same pace as the general price level. It is notorious that when general prices fall wages and other fixed incomes, which form the largest item in the total outlay of every employer, do not fall in the same proportion ; and when general prices rise they do not rise as fast as general prices, but generally lag behind. And this was just what was happening in a silverstandard country like India and a gold-standard country like England during the period of 1873-93 (see Chart IV). Prices had fallen in England, but wages had not fallen to the same extent. Prices had risen in India, but wages had not risen to the same extent. The English manufacturer was penalized, if at all, not by any act on the part of his Indian rival, but by reason of the wages of the former’s employees having remained the same, although the price of his products had fallen. The Indian producer got a bounty, if any, not because he had an English rival to feed upon, but because he did not have to pay higher wages, although the price of his product had risen.
The conclusion, therefore, is that the falling exchange could not have disturbed established trade relations or displaced the
- See infra. Chap. IV,