11th June.
Tr is difficult to understand why the Tnspector-General of Customs, Sir Robert Hart, ordered the publication in English and. Chinese of Mr. Woodruff's Remedial Suggestions for China's Defective Currency; for, as a little examination will show, like Sir Charles Coldstream's Vesuvius, " there's nothing in it." Mr. Woodruff begins with the statement that: "On the 11th of March, 1896, the Governor of Hapeh, and on the 23rd of May the Viceroy and Governor jointly, fixed a relative rate between Hupeh dollars, standard copper cash, and cash and dollar notes. the most excellent purpose of their proclamations was to remedy the present harmful dearness" of cash; but it is stated that difficulties for both officials and people have, unhappily, made it impossible to carry out the plan." Then comes a most inadequate and misleading reference to the battle of the standards at home, from which the casual reader would infer that some twenty years ago Great Britain, Germany, France, the United States, and the other nations " suddenly changed to a single gold standard." Mr. Woodruff adds that "the single gold standard. is doing world-wide harm, and in time all countries must unite in an international agreement for the former joint standard," and then comes the amazing non-sequitur: "and then China can rate cash to silver." That is to say, that when the rest of the world agrees on a fixed ratio between gold and silver, China can fix a ratio between silver and copper. Inconsequential as it is, this is probably true, but the virtue lies.in the " when."
In fifteen years cash have risen at Ichang from-'I'ls. 0.58 to 'Tls. 0.86 per 1,000. This, says Mr. Woodraff, is partly due to the depreciation': of silver, which can only be remedied by international agreement; but it: is also due to the scarcity of cash, The causes of this scarcity are sufficiently stated; they are, the abandonment of minting by the Government, the secret coining of small cash and its prohibition by the. Government, and the hoarding or melting down for the copper they contain of the good old cash.
The remedial measures Mr. Woodruff recommends are that Government should freely coin new cash and exchange them for the old; and "when new cash are in sufficiency everywhere, all old cash still in circulation should be confiscated and recoined or the materials sold." After this, "the people should still be permitted to at any time take the materials to the mints and have them coined into cash free of charge." How this would work Mr. Woodruff explains in a very obscure paragraph, which is perhaps more intelligible in the Chinese, for the paper appears to have been originally written in Chinese and translated into English. The explanation then is:—"'Ihe Government already pays the mint expenses of the cash it issues; the only change would be that instead of issuing as many as it thinks the people will need, it would provide as many as the people have found that they need. For when cash are dear because of scarcity, the metals of which, they are made are worth more in them "than in the market, so people would bring them to the mints for the profits through free coinage." (Mr. Woodruff apparently means the metals, not the cash.) "When the cash become sufficient, the' metals are worth.no more in them than in the market, and people will cease to be eager. When they are redundant, the metals will be worth most in the market. The overstocked cash shops must devise ways to avoid loss; and not only will no one take metals to the mints, but cash will be sent to other places, or melted to obtain the market profit on the materials,"
The root of the trouble, which Mr, Woodruff evades, is that one thousand copper cash of full weight and size carnot now be produced for one dollar's worth of silver; and the Government cannot keep up a sufficient supply of cash at 1,000 to the dollar unless they are allowed-to reduce the weight or debase the material of which the cash
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.