light as merely guesses after truth.' A higher scholarship, a broader and better historical method able to distinguish more accurately betwixt the facts and the imaginations of the past, a more enlightened and tolerant comprehension of human character, and of the forces at work in all great social and religious changes, must modify powerfully our conceptions both of morality and religion. This is a progress which can never be stayed, and the consequences of which we must bear, however it may carry away with it many cherished prejudices which we have held as part of the Divine Truth which has come to us from former generations. But this is something entirely different from the course to which our modern materialistic schools invite us. With them it is not merely the form but the substance of past beliefs which must be abandoned. We must not merely change the dwelling of our highest thoughts, but we must disown them altogether. We must unclothe ourselves of our spiritual heritage, and turn into the bleak open tracts of nature with no future before us and only superstition behind us. As the prospect is miserable, the necessity is unreasonable. There can be no true progress in cutting ourselves adrift from the highest results of former progress. For as a great if sometimes erratic writer of our own time has well said in a recent volume- The knowledge of mankind, though continually increasing, is built pinnacle after pinnacle ' on the foundation of those adamant stories of ancient soul'— the scriptures of past ages. It is the law of progressive human life that we shall not build in the air, but in the already high-storied temple of the thoughts of our ancestors -in the crannies and under the eaves we are meant for the 'most part to nest ourselves like swallows, though the stronger ' of us sometimes may bring for increase of height some small 'white stone, and on the stone a new name written, which is, indeed, done by those ordered to such masonry, but never ' without modest submission to the Eternal Wisdom; nor ever in any great degree except by persons trained reverently in some large portion of the wisdom of the past.' *

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Ruskin's Bibliotheca Pastorum,' vol. i., 'Economist of Xenophon,' Editor's Preface, pp. x., xi.

ART. VIII.—1. Report from the Select Committee on the Depreciation of Silver. 1876.

2. M. Michel Chevalier et le Bimetallisme. Par HENRI CERNUSCHI. Paris: 1876.

SILVER has fallen twenty per cent.

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Silver, one of the reigning metals, elected to be a standard of value on account of its stability from the oldest times, has undergone the fate of plebeian ores. It has fallen and risen and fallen again, with violent and sudden fluctuations, as if it were no better than common iron or lead. Anglo-Indians are aghast. The financial world is in tribulation. Political economists are at their wits' end. Economical heretics are at the height of enjoyment. The event is heralded with the usual accompaniments of extraordinary phenomena in the present day-a deluge of pamphlets, an impatient cry for Government action, a convenient reference to a Select Committee, a Report without the indication of a policy, and, finally, the determination of the Government to wait and see.' In the meantime, the imperious orthodoxy of the Secretary of State for India finds congenial employment in the suppression of currency heresies, while the youthful smartness of the political Under-Secretary is awed into sobriety by the prolonged contemplation of an insoluble financial problem. Sir Louis Mallet is carried by the actual duties of the permanent Under-Secretaryship into those regions of speculative political economy for which he is equally qualified by his talents and his tastes, while the members of the India Council revel in a legitimate opportunity for an official discussion, in a practical shape, of all the financial crotchets which have exercised the ingenuity of Indian administrators for the last twenty years. In France, bi-metallists and mono-metallists are profiting by the occasion to pummel each other with truly theological fury. M. Cernuschi dashes off pamphlet after pamphlet, carrying a brilliant and imaginative fanaticism into the driest regions of currency controversy; while M. Chevalier, a weighty antagonist, joins a crusade for the dethronement of silver, with a not less determined onslaught than that he made at another time for the humiliation of gold.

But what does it all mean? Is the subject beyond the plain intelligence of people unversed in currency jargon? Must we perforce sound the depths of the argument between bi-metallists and mono-metallists before we can understand it? Alas! the meaning of the depreciation of silver' is but

6

too clear. It is written in ruinous mercantile transactions, in the deficit of the Indian Budget, in the diminished resources of many households. Whilst pamphleteers and economists are hammering out their difficult theories, and half the Governments of Europe are producing blue-books crammed with scientific and statistical information, a popular version of the fall of silver' can be procured from many a man whose views of currency and foreign exchanges are limited to an opinion as to the number of pence to which he thinks himself entitled in exchange for a rupee, or to the average amount of sterling money which experience has taught him to believe an ounce of silver ought to fetch. Ask the Indian civil servant what in his eyes the fall in silver means? He will tell you that when he sends home a portion of his pay, one-fifth is lost before his family can spend it. The same rupees are set aside for friends at home, but the hundred pounds they used to yield, alas! have dwindled to eighty. True, the rate of exchange has always been to Anglo-Indians an object of significant interest. The rise and fall of a penny per rupee has always meant an appreciable difference of money to spend, but a fall of fourpence to fivepence on every rupee had never entered the most despondent imagination. Such a loss means no less, to families dependent on Indian remittances, than a revision of the entire scale of their domestic budgets. Ask the Manchester exporter of manufactured goods for his version of the situation. His account will be clear enough. He has exported goods to India. The goods have been sold for a certain number of silver rupees. These rupees have to be brought home; but the value of claims on India payable in rupees fluctuates with the value of the silver those rupees contain. The same claims on Indian purchasers, which at the old average exchange, based on the then value of silver, could have been turned into 10,000l. of English money, will only yield 8,000l. when silver has fallen 20 per cent. A loss of 2,0001. stares the manufacturer in the face as an illustration of the depreciation of silver. So, again, London banking establishments, with branches in India, have found a regular and lucrative business in collecting deposits at home, at low European interest, and transmitting them, transformed into rupees, to India, to be lent out at the higher Indian rates. Debts in gold were thus incurred to English and Scotch depositors, and claims payable in silver established on India. When the English money deposited was transformed into silver for Indian use, the average price of silver was 5s. per ounce. But, suppose the exigencies of the banks or their depositors

compel the recall of such outstanding funds, and their retransfer into English gold, at a time when the worth of an ounce of silver has fallen from 5s. to 4s. One-fifth of the capital is lost at a blow! Not through default of debtors; not through imprudent speculations; not through any lack of business foresight; but because silver, the legal tender of India, has played false. No wonder if, in these days, when every public inconvenience is laid at the door of Government or law, and every accident is expected to be followed forthwith by an Act of Parliament, we hear an impatient cry for measures of redress! How is English capital outstanding in India to be brought home without enormous loss? Is it not the currency which is at fault? And are not the freaks of the precious metals preeminently a Government affair?

Take the case of Government stocks or railway debentures, of which the dividends are payable in silver, but which are held in countries where a gold currency prevails. Many Austrian securities are in this position. The unfortunate holders bought their stocks when silver was assumed to have a steady value, and to offer a scarcely less regular income than dividends payable in gold. But silver falls with startling rapidity, its price oscillates to and fro, and the holders of silver dividends find themselves, not in receipt of a fixed income, but speculating against their will in a metal of which the price may fluctuate 20 per cent. The same loss, the same miscalculation, occurs where Governments are so placed that under previous and irrevocable engagements they have to receive in silver and to pay in gold. The German Government, carrying out its stupendous operation of substituting a gold for a silver currency, is under contract to its subjects to withdraw the old silver coins, and to give new gold coins for them at a fixed rate of ex change. The relative values of gold and silver were taken when this rate was fixed, on the basis of the proportion which had been the law in France from the beginning of the century, namely, at 15 to 1. For all silver coin presented for exchange the German Government must give gold at this rate. The fall in silver has changed the relative value; but the operation must be continued all the same. A pound of gold must still be given for fifteen pounds and a half of silver; but the fifteen pounds and a half of silver, when sold by the German Government, will no longer buy a pound of gold. The Indian Government receives the whole of its revenue in silver rupees, but of its payments no less a sum than 15,000,000l. sterling has to be made in gold. The disbursements in England and the interest on loans raised at home must be discharged in English coin. The conversion

of the silver received into the gold to be paid out, stripped of all the technicalities of exchange, leaves a loss, on the basis of a fall of 20 per cent., of no less than 3,000,0001. sterling per

annum.

The foregoing illustrations of the consequences flowing from the depreciation of silver all disclose a clear and tangible loss. Indeed, the result is so self-evident that we should have hesitated to fill a page with such elementary instances, if we had not wished to be enabled, by setting them out in some detail, to point to one condition which is common to all these cases of loss incurred. It will be observed that they all distinctly involve a transfer from silver to gold. The loss is incurred in the process of an actual simple exchange from one metal to another. Silver and gold are in all these cases brought face to face. Silver, it is clear, has fallen when measured by gold, or to speak still more plainly, when sold for gold. But is this enough to establish and explain an absolute fall in the value of silver? Is it not possible that gold has become dearer? Is silver not a standard of value in one part of the world, as gold is in another? Is it sufficient, then, to illustrate the fall of silver simply by measuring its value against gold? Should we be satisfied to prove a rise in the value of gold by showing that it would exchange, as indeed it does now exchange, for more silver than before? Surely a fall in silver, as a rise or fall in gold, must be measured by its relation not only to another metal, but to the prices of commodities in those countries where it reigns supreme. How much of its purchasing power has silver lost within its own domains?

Unfortunately, we must travel very far before we find regions where silver is still the sole standard of value and rules with undivided sway. In Europe, it scarcely retains a single important kingdom. In Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, it has lately been formally dethroned, and gold installed in its place. In Holland, its rule has been suspended, and temporarily handed over to gold. In Russia and Austria, it has a mere titular sovereignty, under the anarchical régime of unlimited paper issues. Within the boundaries of the Latin Monetary Union,' that is to say, in France, Belgium, Italy, and Switzerland, the area of the double standard, it scarcely enjoys a precarious moiety of authority, having been stripped of the chief privilege of monetary supremacy--the right to be coined without limitation. No wonder that under such circumstances, silver scarcely still receives the homage due to a reigning metal and is treated as a subject, not as a rival, of gold. But discarded in Europe, silver is still at this