efforts had succeeded in establishing a stable ratio by making gold legal tender.²³⁵ All these guarantees the Government of India had offered in a pathetic faithfulness to the cause of bimetallism, on the success of which it had depended so much. Consequently, when the attempt failed, the disappointment caused to the Government of India almost broke its heart. It is nut too severe to say that the part played by the British authorities in causing this disappointment was highly irresponsible—one might almost say wicked. They forced India against her declared wishes to keep to the silver standard, partly to trail her off from [pg 142] making any demand for gold, and partly to silence the criticisms of other nations that Britain was not taking her share in the matter of rehabilitating silver.²³⁶ This was not the only advantage exacted from a country bound to obey. On the one hand it restrained the Government of India from taking any independent line of action in the matter of currency reform, and on the other such means as were calculated to make good the losses which arose from a depreciating currency were subjected to Parliamentary censure. The House of Commons was twice moved, once in 1877 and again in 1879, to resolve that the Government of India should lower its tariff, ostensibly in the interest of free trade, but really in the interests of relief to the depressed condition of Lancashire. The consequence was that the Government could not tap one important source of its revenue in times of its greatest adversity. The only adequate recompense the British authorities could have made to a Government so completely paralysed by their dictations, and of whose interests they so loudly claimed to be the lawful trustees, was to have consented to join the bimetallic union, the consummation of which only waited upon their grace. But, as is well known, they did nothing of the kind, so that, after a period of enforced waiting and by no means unavoidable suffering, the Government of India, at the end of 1893, found itself just where it was at the beginning of 1878. ²³⁰ P.P.C, 3229 of 1882, p. 33 _et seq_. ²³¹ _Ibid._, p. 37. ²³² Dated February 2, 1886, _see_ C. 4868 of 1886, p. 5 _et seq_. ²³³ Cf. the despatch of September 4 1886, App. II to the _First Report of the Royal Commission on Gold and Silver_, 1886. ²³⁴ Cf. the evidence before the Gold and Silver Commission of 1886 of Mr. S. Smith, Q. 4,825–30; also of Mr. Watney, Q. 9,427. ²³⁵ Cf. _The Report of the Indian Delegates_, p. 12. ²³⁶ Cf. the speech of Mr. Goschen at the International Monetary Conference of 1878, Third Session. Report of the American Delegates, Senate Executive Document, No. 58, Forty-fifth Congress, Third Session, Washington, 1879, pp. 50–52.