THE DEPRECIATION OF SILVER 29
For so long as anyone, even though he were not living
in a bimetallist country, desired to sell silver and could
find a market by sending it to the mint of a neigh-
bouring country, for a price in gold corresponding to the
legal ratio obtaining there, it was generally true that the rate
of silver could not fall permanently much below the legal
ratio (less the cost of transport and coinage, interest on
the sum locked up in the process of minting, the cost
of returning the gold obtained and possibly an insur-
ance premium and a few miscellaneous expenses necessi-
tated by this method of conversion). But with the disap-
pearance of the minting of silver for the benefit of private in-
dividuals, this process had become impracticable and anyone
desiring to sell silver no longer had it to fall back upon.
The rate of silver was thus limited by a maximum ; for
in the last resort it could be obtained by having gold coined
in a bimetallist country ; but there was no longer a mini-
mum rate. Or, rather, a minimum rate—nearly equal to
the maximum—could only have reappeared if the aggre-
gate amounts payable in silver standard countries had been
such that with insufficient stocks available on the silver
market it had become necessary, as in the years between
1850 and 1866, to draw for this purpose upon the silver
crown holdings of the bank or in circulation.
But it will be remembered that the position was quite
different at the time when the free coinage of silver was
suppressed ; for not only did India require comparatively
small shipments of silver, but, since Germany and the
Scandinavian countries had gone on to gold, any surplus
foreign credits of these countries, as in the case of Eng-
land, no longer had to be converted from gold into silver,
but from silver into gold.
In these circumstances the disappearance of the coin-
age of silver, by abolishing the previous minimum rate,
exposed it for the future to unrestricted fluctuations which
tended towards depreciation. Hence, comparing the state
of the silver market during and after the period of Bi-
metallism, we are led to the following conclusion :
The suppression of free coinage was not the sole cause of the
