⁴⁷ Cf. H. of C. Return, East Indian (Coinage) 254 of 1860. ⁴⁸ _Ibid_., p. 8. ⁴⁹ _Ibid_., p. 10. The abrogation of bimetallism in India accomplished by the Act of 1835, cannot therefore be made a ground for censure. But it is open to argument that a condemnation of bimetallism is not _per se_ a justification of silver monometallism. If it was to be monometallism it might well have been gold monometallism. In fact, the preference for silver monometallism is not a little odd when it is recalled that Lord Liverpool, the advocate of monometallism,⁵⁰ whose doctrines the Court had sought to apply to India, had prescribed gold monometallism for similar currency evils then prevalent in England. That the Court should have deviated from their guide in this particular has naturally excited a great deal of hostile comment as to the propriety of this grave departure.⁵¹ At the outset any appeal to ulterior motives must be baseless, for Lord Liverpool was not a “gold bug,” nor was the Court composed of “silver men.” As a matter of fact, neither of them at all considered the question from the standpoint as to which was a better standard of value, gold or silver. Indeed, in so far as that was at all a consideration worth attending to, the choice of the Court, according to the opinion of the time, was undoubtedly a better one than that of Lord Liverpool. Not only were all the theorists, such as Locke, Harris, and Petty, in favour of silver as the standard of value, but the practice of the whole world was also in favour of silver. No doubt England had placed herself on a gold basis in 1816. But that Act, far from closing the English Mint to the free coinage of silver, left it to be opened by a Royal Proclamation.⁵² The Proclamation, it is true, was never issued, but it is not to be supposed that therefore Englishmen [pg 27] of the time had regarded the question of the standard as a settled issue. The crisis of 1825 showed that the gold standard furnished too narrow a basis for the English currency system to work smoothly, and, in the expert opinion of the time,⁵³ the gold standard, far from being the cause of England’s commercial superiority, was rather a hindrance to her prosperity, as it cut her off from the rest of the world, which was mostly on a silver basis. Even the British statesmen of the time had no decided preference for the gold standard. In 1826 Huskisson actually proposed that Government should issue silver certificates of full legal tender.⁵⁴ Even as late as 1844 the question of the standard was far from being settled, for we find Peel in his Memorandum⁵⁵ to the Cabinet discussing the possibility of abandoning the gold standard in favour of the silver or a bimetallic standard without any compunction or predilection one way or the other. The difficulties of fiscal isolation were evidently not so insuperable as to compel a change of the standard, but they were great enough to force Peel to introduce his famous proviso