High rates of 7 or 8 per cent are not obtainable in India all the year round. The case is worse, because at most periods of great commercial excitement there is some mixture of the older and simpler kind of investing mania. Brunyate, who remarks on its appropriateness to present conditions. All the present directors, including the Governor and Deputy-Governor, are engaged in their own business, and it is very possible, indeed it must perpetually have happened, that their own business as merchants most occupied the minds of most of them just when it was most important that the business of the Bank should occupy them. In many European countries the credit of the State had been so much better than any other credit, that it had been used to strengthen the beginnings of banking.
But where the two centres are near together and there is no reason to anticipate the suspension of a free market in gold, this cost is, relatively, a minor consideration. But so much depends on habit and tradition, that the India Office on one side of Downing Street can do without remark, and with universal assent, what it would be thought ‘unsound’ and extravagant to propose that the other side should do.