That the Treasury acted “in a spirit of scarcely veiled hostility to the whole proposal” is unmistakable. But it cannot be denied that the Treasury used arguments that were perfectly sound. It was inconsequential to the working of the gold standard whence the coined sovereigns came. So long as a Mint was open to the free coinage of sovereigns the Indian gold standard would have been complete irrespective of the location of the Mint. Indeed, to have obtained coined sovereigns from London would have not only sufficed, but would have been economical. The anxiety displayed by the Government was not, [pg 160] however, on account of the want of a gold Mint. Indeed, so slight was its faith in the necessity of it that in view of the opposition of the Treasury it gracefully consented to drop the proposal. What troubled it most was the peculiar position of the rupee in the new system of currency. Throughout the despatch of the Government of India there ran a strain of regret that it could not see its way to demonetize the rupee and to assimilate the Indian currency to that prevailing in England. A general perusal of the despatch leaves the impression that though it recommended the assimilation of the Indian currency to that of France and the United States, it did so not because it thought that their systems furnished the best model, but because it believed that a better one was not within reach. Having regard to the accepted view of the French and the United States currency systems, it was natural that the Government of India did not feel very jubilant about its own. According to that view of the currency systems of these two countries, the position of the five-franc piece and the silver dollar has always been presented as being very anomalous. Even so great an authority as Prof. Pierson was unable to assign them a place intelligible in the orthodox scheme of classifying different forms of money.²⁷² In a well-ordered system of gold standard of the orthodox type, gold is the only metal freely coined and the only one metal having full legal-tender power; silver, though coined, is coined only on Government account in limited amounts, and being of less intrinsic value than its nominal value, is a limited legal tender. The former type of coins are called standard coins and the latter subsidiary coins, and the two together make up the ideal of a monometallic gold standard such as has been established in England since 1816. In a scheme of things like this writers have found it difficult to fit in the dollar or the five-franc piece. Their peculiarity consists in the fact that although their intrinsic value is less than their nominal value they have been inconvertible and are also unlimited legal tender. It is owing to this anomaly that the title of gold standard has been refused to the American [pg 161] and French currency systems. Few can have confidence in what is called the limping standard,²⁷³ in which it is