554 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
The smaller the gold-standard reserve the better it would be, for there would be no inflation, no fall in the purchasing power of the rupee, and no necessity for its retirement.
Having regard to its origin, the gold-standard reserve, instead of acting as a brake upon reckless issue of rupee currency, is the direct cause of it and tends to aggravate the effects of an inconvertible currency rather than counteract them. Perversity cannot go further. If the fact that a mechanism like that of the gold-standard reserve, set up for the purpose of limiting the currency, cannot be made to function without adding to the currency, does not render the system an unsound currency, one begins to wonder what would. Great names have been invoked in support of the exchange standard. After trying hard to find authoritative precedents for his plan,* Mr. Lindsay claimed before the Fowler Committee that it was founded upon the Report of the Parliamentary Committee on Irish Exchange.† There he was on firm ground. Among other things, the Committee did recommend that for stabilizing the exchange between England and Ireland the Bank of Ireland should open credit at the Bank of England and sell drafts on London at a fixed price. In so far as the exchange standard rests on gold reserve in London, Lindsay must be said to have faithfully copied the plan of the Irish Committee on exchange. But he totally
- In 1876, when Mr. Lindsay first set out his scheme in the pages of his Calcutta Review, he mentions no parallel at all. in 1892, in his Ricardo’s Exchange Remedy, he uttered the name of Ricardo as an authority for his plan, but in 1898 he shifted his ground, so much so that he blamed ( Economic journal, supra ) Probyn for taking Ricardo’s gold bar plan as a basis. The reason why he disavowed Ricardo as his authority most probably lies in the fact that Ricardo’s general views of currency were rather damaging to his position. In view of the fact that there are so many people who assert, no doubt, from the title of his Proposals for an Economical and Secure Currency, that Ricardo wrote against a metallic standard, it is worth while recording the following passage from his Proposals, in which he says : “During the late discussion on the bullion questions, it was almost justly contended that a currency, to be perfect, should be absolutely invariable in value. But it was said, too, that ours had become such a currency, by the Bank Restriction Bill; for by that bill we had wisely discarded gold and silver as the standard of our money...... Those who supported this opinion did not see that such a currency, instead of being variable, was subject to the greatest variations— that the only use of a standard is to regulate the quantity, and by the quantity the value of the currency—and that without a standard it would be exposed to all the fluctuations to which the ignorance or the interests of the issuers might subject it.”
† The Report, which is a masterly document, was eclipsed by the Bullion Report, though both contain the same doctrine, by reason of its not being printed till 1826. See Lords Paper 48 of 1826.