The Sun.
London, England, 1864-09-12 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

THE "EXAMINER" ON THE SUPPOSED HOARD
INO OF THE PRECIOUS METALS IN INDIA.—We are
thoroughly satisfied that the imagined hoarding,
burying, and waste in trinkets of the people of India,
although a theory as old as the Romans,is no better
than hereditary figment. India is not a sink of the
precious metals any more than it is a sink of copper,
tin, or zinc. It produces itself neither gold nor
silver any more than it does these vulgar metals.
As their presence is indispensable India must have
them, and it gets them from the quarter that can
supply them at the cheapest price, This, for the
present, happens to be England, although other
European nations, and even now and then the
Cninese, contribute a minor share. Indeed, India,
in regard to the precious metals, is very much in
the condition of England herself, for wo have no
gold of our own production, and very little silver.
We import nearly all that we use, and yet we are
not a sink of the precious metals, although we ven-
ture to assert that the waste of them with us is pro-
portionally far greater than in India. The Hindus
are eminently a frugal, even a parsimonious people,
and none know better than they the two sides of a
coin. This characteristic of the race extends even
to the humblest orders. The value of money among
them is high ; they are bankers and money-changers
in every village, and they count by scores in
towns and cities; bills of exchange, also, are of
immemorial use among them. Is such a state of
society there is no temptation to boarding, and we
are quite satisfied that very little exists. The only
kind of hoarding of the precious metals that we
can call to mind is that which has been occasionally
practised by some frugal native princes. The King
of Oude, for example, had ence'a hoard of some
millions, and the notorious Kirwi booty, said to
amount to /700,000, was once the hoard of a
Mahratta prince. But such hoardings were but
partial exceptions. Still less temptation must
there ho to bury treasure; an expedient, indeed,
never had recourse to by any people except during
foreign invasions and long civil wars, and from
bath the verger part of India has been free for from
one-half to a whole century. Much has been made,
and in our opinion very erroneously made, of
'Endo() ornaments and trinkets, to account for the
imagined disappearance of the millions of tLe pre-
cious motels yearly brought to India. rhis refers
chit fly to silver, for in such articles gold is tu.
rarely employed even by the very few wealthy.
Cho trinkets consist of bracelets, armlets necklaces
and earrings, and with few exceptions their use is
confined to women and children. The Hindus use
neither silver forks nor silver spoons, and they
waste no silver in plating, for the urt is unknown
to them. A tnan or woman of means may some-
times have a silver betel or tobacco-hor, and the
woman now and then a silver skewer for her hair,
but that is all. Thu Hindus wear no watches,
unlike the Chinese who do wear them, and
always two at a time. A well-to-do English
farmer or prosperous artisan will be possessed of
more articles of luxury
in gold and silver than
a whole Hindu village of 1,000 inhabitants. but
we do not on that account charge him with wasting
the precious metals and diverting them from their
more important office. Neither ought we to charge
the Hindu peasant with wasting them because he
decorates his wife and children with armlets, brace-
lets, and anklets. The chief use to which the pre.
cious metals, but more especially silver, is put in
India is as money, as indeed it is in every civilised
country. India from its
importation
has to supply
not only itself, but ale, the countries in its imme-
diate neighbourhood, for these have no other chan-
nel by which they can receive them, and like it,
p
they produce none themselves. Probably not less
than two hundred and fifty millions of people, or
one.fifth of the camcomputed population of the globe,
has thus to be supplied. From the very nature of
things this population must
always be supplied
with foreign gold and silver. Of late years, but
especially since the discovery of the gold of Cali
fornia and Australia, the importation of the precious
metals has greatly increased, arising wholly fretn
the increased prosperity of India. The reader may
judge of this increase by the value of cur own im-
-named year the value
ports from that country at two not very remote
periods. In 1854 the value of our imports was but
£13,000,000, and in 1862 they had risen to
£39,000,000,
or in eight short years had been mul-
tiplied threefold.r In the
was ew but £17,000,000, and ofou r
expota to India
even adding 50 par cent. to this sum, so as to ap-
proximate it to the Indian value, the whole will
only amount to £25,500,000, making a difference in
the value of the imports and exports of £130500,000
to be balanced by a payment in specie which Sc.
counts for the millions exported yearly to India.
There the money is not hoarded or buried or sr.-
ended in trinkets, but, with trifling
exceptions, it
finds employment in new branches of industry
or
the extension of old ones.

rho subject of Lord
Lewis, as ae in singu-THE "SPECTATOR'' ON THE
,PREMIER AND SIR
, that
pGaziomeeGnetcCifs
pEeNeVsAhL,Lstea.gl Eiroe—: t
politicians usually
lar contrast to his eulogi.st. A man
of less
official
. the hadmied phrase that
was perhaps one of the
experience than any of his micrn. distinguished col•
leagues, he made far more effective use of the expo.
" history is evHeris
to him philosophy
philo-
sophy teaching
makercv ietterrnicyef
ieeoowffs
omt othershlioenvidress
otitwhao
by experience," became something
whichan'rn'idicu.le
meant the lucidly digested lessons of history. The
whole basis of Sir George Lervie's strength, how-
ever, was intellectual, as the whole basis of Lord
like a truth; or rather, Perhaps,
Palmerston's strength (except so far as intellect is
involved in a clear head for business) is non-intel-
lectual, the ease of his manner, the pliancy of his
convictions, the strength of his ambition, Sir
George Lewis bad probably little or no
ambitious impulse
to drive hint upwards. He had
a sort of intellectual contempt for half the questions
discussed by politicians and the fuss they created ;
and so quiet and assured a conviction upon the
other half, that it scarcely seemed worth while to
answer the fallacies that were put out against him.
He had studied early, too, under one of the greatest
of jurists, Mr Auttin, and a very able writer who
knew him in some ways better than any other of
his contemporaries has told US that Sir George
Lewis's politics were throughout penetrated by Mr
Austin's teaching
.forming a code of principles at
the very basis of his intellect. Nothing could create
a greater contrast between) the two politicians than
this difference. Lord 1 aliners'en catches at his
" principles" hastily when he wants them; and in-
tuitively avoidsexpre.seing ar,y,in
matters of political
moment, as far as it is
is not
to do so. What per,
tinacity he has, and it not small, is the pertinacity
of strong predilection, not of strong conviction—of
will and preference tempered b y sagacity in judging
the public, not of belief. Sir. G. Lewis's princi-
ples were never of the doctrinaire and cast-iron
kind, for they were deducedstrietty from experience
by a cautious and sceptical intellect that cared no-
thing at all what result he arrived at so long as it
was the true one—but when he had reached a con-
clusion, though he never hesitated to yield practi-
cally on a point that ho did not think of importance,
ho was peobJbly incapable of being even affected
iatellemallY by the diskeut of the world. There