Lord George Hamilton, in the course of his speech, made
one of those wonderful blunders which would destroy any politician not a Duke's son with a safe seat. He preferred to raise money, he said, in India, because if he borrowed £2,500,000 in England at 4 per cent., "during the next twenty-five years the interest of 1100,000 payable annually here was exactly £2,500,000; but then the principal was due,—viz., £2,500,000. So that for a loan of /2,500,000 in one year they eventually would have had to pay double that amount." Yes, or twenty times that amount, if the money is not paid for 250 years, but the process would be pre- cisely the same in India. We can assure Lord George Hamilton that the laws of simple arithmetic are not in the least affected by geography or by the height of the thermometer, and that although he may not know it, twice two is four even in the remote longitude of Calcutta. We have quoted his exact words, as reported in the Times, and can only suppose that he had got himself into a fog over some calculation about exchanges. In a century the loss by exchange of sixpence on each rupee—needless, if money can be raised in India on the same terms—would double the debt.
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