SILVER AND THE UNREST IN INDIA. [To THE EDITOE OP
THE " SPECTATOR.'] Sts,—The announcement in Parliament by the Secretary of State for India that still another Commission is to examine the eternal exchange problem of silver permits me to ask your consideration for its wider philosophic incidence, which in a very few years must occupy the historian, and will, be cure, bankrupt many cheap-Jack reputations. You hare, I ntn aware, decided in the years past not to open your columns 10 the economics of this great question, and this being so I propose in this letter to respect that decision as far as possible. It is only what I may describe as its "Foreign Relations" n,pect that I am now anxious to present.
The quarter of a century before 1893 was chiefly memorable for the growth and virulence of an anti-English sentiment at Washington. The quarter of a century since 1893 has been marked by a sporadic all-pervasive unrest within that naturally passive community, India. Have both these sinister conditions perhaps the same tap-root, " silver " ? I was only the other day looking over old letters of the early " nineties " from and about the United States. I came across a very large nUmber all pointing the some way, but three of which the present sea-on appears to have ripened to harvest. One letter addressed to me April 23rd, 1894, is signed by thirty-three Senators, and it sets out frankly enough that because of Eng- land's record on " silver," America proposes to reason with her through such tariff legislation as will most damage British trade and industry. The letter was entirely non-party; it had not been in any way solicited by me, but was occasioned le; a cable addressed to the Senate by Mr. Cecil Rhodes asking for some reduction in the duty on diamonds. This letter It as not any "wild West," any "mining States," screech. It was a reasoned argument signed by all the four Senators from Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, by a Democratic Senator from Ohio, by a Republican Senator from Massachusetts, by the Chairman of the Foreign Relation's Committee. This letter has never been published; looking back, it seems to me I failed to perform what might have been a public service. Two yeaiu after this there came that odious explosion, President Cleve- land's Venezuela Message, which gauged the extreme high- water mark of Anglophobia in the case of those relations. Whereupon I wrote an expression of my regret to a friend at that time in the Senate from a great Eastern State, a scholar, a man of judicial temper, eminently a man of the world, and who was destined later to occupy that all-important post of Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. This friend replies in January, 1896, that the true cause of this anti- English outburst is England's attitude on silver. The third letter to which I refer was from a friehd here, declined later to fill the highest position of all in the British Empire, and to whom' I bad submitted the letter of the Amerihan Senator. This statesman, writing February 3rd, 1896, expresses his
agreement that "silver" is the real cause of this unexampled ebullition of ill-feeling toward England. Now the ructions and trouble at Washington had been chiefly fed by the public perusal of the debates on the passage of the Bland Act in 1878 and on its repeal in 1893. It was a thoroughly unsound and mischievous measure, and yet no sooner had it been repealed there, amidst the plaudits of the London Press, than it was bodily transferred to India, and has ever since done just the same poisonous anti-British work there that it did on the Potomac. The only difference that I was ever able to discover between the Bland Act and the Act that tampered with the Indian currency is that the Bland Act called for a small strictly limited coinage of silver each mouth, the India Act for a vast and unlimited coinage whenever the latest prentice hand arriving from London desired to see a fresh pyrotechnical display in the world's silver market.
This tampering with the Indian currency in 1893 had when first proposed been tried, condemned, and unanimously executed by a most distinguished Royal Commission in 1879, the only survivor of which is Mr. Balfour. In 1893 the pro- posed revolution in the standard of value was denounced by every authority, by every student of economics without one exception. In the reluctant permission wrung by the Govern- ment of India from the Hersehell Committee that Committee was barely induced to report to theSecretary of State for India : " While conscious of the gravity of the suggestion, we cannot advise your Lordship to orerrule [my italics] the proposals for the closing of the Mints and the adoption of a Gold Standard."
During the twenty-two years that followed, this Bland Act in India w-rote fully fifty per cent. off the accumulated capital (their silver hoards) of the very poorest of our fellow-citizens, and, far worse than this, it handed them over to be fleeced by the Marwari—the most merciless usurers on the earth's surface. We had supposed in our innocence that at least the operative class in the great Bombay cotton mills earned a living wage; that at least these highly organized people were not Shylocked to madness. Yet take the Report prepared in February last by the Bombay Surveyor-Genera, for Sir Thomas Holland's Commission. Mr. Mirams estimates the family income of the employees at 26 rupees per month, and he says food and rent with "pan and biddis" take 20 rupees; that eighty per cent. of the workers are in debt on an average Ill rupees, on which sum they pay per month 7 rupees, or 75 per cent. per annum. Of 26 rupees of income he has thus tabulated 27 rupees of expenditure; and we wonder that there is "unrest." Such is the industrial community we by tampering with the rupee and by manipulating their exchange have built up, and built up largely at the expense of Blanchester! Of these empirical methods and their. "account rendered" a year since, in his Budget speech last March, Sir James Meston, the Finance Minister, says:—
" The whole story is as good as any romance. . . . It seemed from week to week an utter impossibility that the Government of India could possibly escape from the suspension of specie payments. . . We are on permanently unsafe ground until India is educated up to abandon its habit of hoarding money. . . . Unless it is checked - we may be forced to reconsider the whole basis of our currency and exchange policy."
How Sir Robert Gillen most have turned in his grave! When this " Gold Exchange Policy " was finally decreed in 1879 by surely the most egregious Committee of our generation, Giffen wrote to the Times :-
"The highest political issues are also involved. One of the most dangerous things for a Government to do is to tamper with the people's money. Is it certain that the Indian Govern- ment can go on long with its present ideas regarding money without producing the gravest complications in the Government of India itself?"
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