484 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
jubilant about its own. According to that view of the currency systems of these two countries, the position of the five-franc piece and the silver dollar has always been presented as being very anomalous. Even so great an authority as Prof. Pierson was unable to assign them a place intelligible in the orthodox scheme of classifying different forms of money.* In a well-ordered system of gold standard of the orthodox type, gold is the only metal freely coined and the only one metal having full legal-tender power; silver, though coined, is coined only on Government account in limited amounts, and being of less intrinsic value than its nominal value, is a limited legal tender. The former type of coins are called standard coins and the latter subsidiary coins, and the two together make up the ideal of a monometallic gold standrd such as has been established in England since 1816. In a scheme of things like this, writers have found it difficult to fit in the dollar or the five-franc piece. Their peculiarity consists in the fact that although their intrinsic value is less than their nominal value they have been inconvertible and are also unlimited legal tender. It is owing to this anomaly that the title of gold standard has been refused to the American and French currency systems. Few can have confidence in what is called the limping standards in which it is said that somehow “the silver coin, though intrinsically of less value than the gold, hobbles along, maintained at equality by being coupled with its stronger associate.”‡
But was the French system of currency so very different from the English as to create doubt as to its stability ? Whatever may have been the differences between the two systems a closer analysis shows that they are fundamentally identical. If we read together the French bimetallic law of
1803 and the Mint Suspension Decree of 1878 on the one hand, and on the other the provisions of the English Gold Standard Act of 1816,
- Cf. Principles of Economics, Vol. I, p. 569.
† It was owing to this want of faith that Germany took away, by the law of October 1, 1907, the full legal-tender power from her silver thalers. In the United States the silver dollar is not legal tender if it is specifically excluded by the terms of a contract. Cf. A. C. Whitaker, Foreign Exchange, Appleton, New York,
1920, pp. 8. and 477.
‡ C. F. W. Taussig, Principles, 2nd ed., 1913, p. 280.