Commons to India combine in a high degree responsibility and ignorance. 14. The circumstances themselves are of very transient importance, but they are likely to have some permanent effect on the particular question which we are now discussing. It will be too much to expect the officials to expose their personal reputations again to a suspicion, however ill–founded, even in the interests of the Indian Exchequer. Next time that the Government of India have to buy silver on a large scale, it is likely that they will do so publicly and pay such extra price as this policy involves. It is not worth a Government’s while to risk its transactions falling into suspicion in order to save half a million pounds. Assuming, therefore, that in future the Government will have to buy publicly, we have to consider whether it is likely to be cheaper for them to buy when the price of silver seems low, and hold stocks in hand, or to wait until the last moment and buy at whatever price is then ruling. I am inclined to think that the second of these two policies is the better—though it is plainly a matter on which it is not possible at present to see one’s way clearly. It is outside the ordinary run of Government officials’ duties to judge whether or not a given time is a good one at which to buy silver. The speculative business of estimating the future of silver is best left to experts in the matter, even though the price ultimately paid has to include some commission to them for their services or their foresight. In the second place the history of the recent speculative ring in silver, so far as it can be known to an outsider, does not suggest that such a transaction is a very easy or profitable thing to carry through, or that the speculators have had a sufficiently striking success to encourage similar attempts on a large scale in the future. I do not know with what profit the ring have emerged from the transaction; but the expense of carrying silver for a long period is great, and the rise in its price in the last two years, though substantial, has not been enough—so far as one can judge—to leave a surplus of profits at all commensurate with the great risks run. In the third place, it does not seem certain that the urgent demands for fresh coinage of rupees, to which India is subject from time to time, will be as frequent in the future as they have been in the immediate past. On the one hand the heavy coinages since 1900 are cumulative in their effect and render further coinages in the future less probable; and on the other hand an increased use (it is to be hoped) of other media of exchange will allow an urgent demand for currency to be met in other ways.