Lindsay, who was then agitating that it was safe and economical to compel it to make the necessary additions by undertaking to coin rupees. It was to adjudicate in the dispute between the Government of India on the one hand and Mr. Lindsay on the other, the former desiring additions by gold coinage and the latter by rupee coinage, that the Fowler Committee was called into being. If the Government was anxious to add to the currency by coining more rupees rather than by the influx of gold, there was no necessity to appoint the Fowler Committee. Such a power had already been given to it by the Herschell Committee. It was because the Government did not want to exercise that ill-charged power that an appeal to a new Committee became necessary. Faced with this immediate problem of how best to expand the currency in relief of monetary stringency, the Committee had solved it in one part of its Report by prescribing that gold should be made legal tender, so that any debtor who was unable to find rupees could have the option of paying his creditors in gold. If gold was allowed to be the general medium of exchange, was not the proposal to coin rupees a superfluous one, quite uncalled for? ⁴³⁵ _See_ Chap. IV, _supra_, p. 147. Thirdly, could the proposal to coin rupees as a means of [pg 290] building up a gold reserve be justified as calculated to maintain the value of the rupee? The one thing essential to the maintenance of the value of the rupee was a limitation on its issue. The Committee talked in a very learned manner about the shilling as being maintained in value in consequence of a limitation in its issue. But did it understand how the shilling was maintained limited in quantity? If it is true that it is not the limit on legal tender, but the limit on the total volume, that maintains the value of the shilling, why is not the shilling issued in unlimited quantities? The manufacture of the shilling is profitable in the same way as is the manufacture of the rupee. Why does not the British Government coin it in unlimited quantities? Only because shillings cannot be paid out in unlimited quantities? If the Government could pay its Chancellors of Exchequer, Cabinet Ministers, and the hosts of officials and clerks, and if they in turn could pay their grocers, milkmen, brewers, and butchers in shillings, there could be nothing to prevent the over-issue of shillings. But it is because nobody can pay out shillings in unlimited quantities that nobody will have them in unlimited quantities. It is the absence of a wholesale market, so to say, due to a limit on legal tender, that stops the Government from indulging in the over-issue of shillings. The Committee was therefore wrong in arguing that the limit on legal tender had nothing to do with the maintenance of the value of the shilling. On the other hand, if limitation of issue is the prime condition which maintains the value of