alone lying in India at one time last winter on board the ships that brought them out or in the docks.  Of these the Indian importer simply refused to take delivery, because to do so would have meant ruin, as, what with the depreciation of the rupee and the fall in market prices, they seldom represented one-half, sometimes not a quarter, of the cost to him, if he took them up.  It was useless to preach to him about the sanctity of contract, for had not Government itself, he declared, set the example of a gross breach of contract by undertaking and then failing to “stabilise” its own rupee currency?  Government pleaded that it had given no undertaking that could be construed as a contract, but the Indian retorted that the Government’s word had been hitherto held as good as its bond, and Indian Extremists found only too ready hearers when they imputed the exchange policy of Whitehall not so much to mere incompetence as to unholy influences behind Whitehall which robbed India in order to fill British pockets.

A wiser spirit ultimately prevailed, and merchants and buyers came together and agreed to compromise, and large stocks were gradually cleared.  If this year’s monsoon is followed by good harvests, and the European markets recover something of their former activity, Indian trade will be gradually restored to more normal conditions.  But the ordeal which it has passed through will have taught some enduring lessons.

Remembering, too, the large profits which London firms used to make on silver purchases for the Government of India, and the enormous Indian balances kept in London in pre-war times which were supposed to be essential to the maintenance of Indian credit but were still more clearly of great convenience for London bankers who had the use of them, Indians who are by no means Extremists ask themselves not unreasonably why, instead of leaving the ordinary laws of supply and demand to work through the ordinary channels of financial and commercial enterprise, the Secretary of State should persist in carrying on big financial operations connected with the adjustment of the balance of trade or any purpose other than his official requirements in regard to what are known as “home charges,” i.e. payments to be made in England on account of the Government of India.

That the effects of the present system as it has worked recently have been deplorable from a political as well as from an economic point of view is shown by the large number of recruits made by Mr. Gandhi from what one might have regarded as the most unlikely classes.  Indian merchants whose interests would seem to be bound up with the maintenance of order and public tranquillity, Bombay Banias and Calcutta Marwaris, have thrown themselves into the “Non-co-operation” movement out of sheer bitterness and loss of confidence in British good faith, boycotting British imported goods and supplying a large part of the funds without which even a Mahatma cannot carry on a prolonged political agitation.