845.515/549
The British Ambassador (Halifax) to the Secretary of State
Dear Mr. Hull: I write to acknowledge your letter of March 14th in which you confirm the United States Government’s decision that 100 million ounces of silver should be made available for use by the Government of India, upon the assumption of joint responsibility of the Governments of the United Kingdom and of India for the return [Page 265] of the silver in question. You further inform me that it has not been found possible to alter the position taken by the State Department in this matter.
- 2.
- I have now received notice from London that my Government authorises me to propose a further solution. The suggestion is made that His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom subscribe to an agreement with the United States Government that, in the event of the Government of India failing to fulfil their obligation, His Majesty’s Government will take all necessary steps to secure delivery to the United States Treasury of the amounts of silver required to implement the agreement.
- 3.
- Such an undertaking would be a formal agreement between His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom and the Government of the United States, and would be complementary to, instead of part of, any agreement between the Government of India and the Government of the United States.
- 4.
- An agreement along these lines would not prejudice the recognised power of the Government of India to enter into international governmental agreements in their own name. And it is out of consideration of India’s status in this respect that I am obliged to ask that, should the United States Government be ready to enter into an agreement with the United Kingdom Government on the lines which I have indicated above, any such agreement should not be made public.
- 5.
- I am afraid that misunderstanding regarding the status of the Government of India persists in many quarters. It is true that India is not an independent sovereign state: the Government of India being in law subject to the general control and the particular directions of His Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for India. The extent, however, to which this statutory right of control can be exercised is substantially qualified. In many matters, it would be in practice no more possible than it would be expedient to attempt to overrule the Government of India, composed as it is today in overwhelming proportion of Indian public men.
- 6.
- You will recall that India was a separate signatory of the Treaty of Versailles54 and of the Paris Convention of 1919 on International Air Navigation.55 She was an original member of the League of Nations and of the International Labour Office. For the past twenty-five years, she has regularly had her own representative at conferences. I may further add that the Government of India will be treated by my Government in exactly the same way as the Governments of Dominions should preliminary conversations take place on post-war civil aviation as has been proposed.
- 7.
- In view, therefore, of the great concern which my Government has for the fostering and developing of India’s status towards independence, and at the same time recognising the urgency of combating the unhappy tendencies towards inflation now prevalent in that country, it is my most earnest hope that you will give careful consideration to the suggestion that an agreement be entered into by your Government and mine which will assist the internal stability of India, without prejudice to the cause of her own political evolution.
Yours sincerely,
- Signed at Versailles, June 28, 1919; annotated text in Foreign Relations, The Paris Peace Conference, 1919, vol. xiii, p. 55.↩
- Signed at Paris, October 13, 1919, Foreign Relations, 1926, vol. i, p. 152.↩