Within the two years through commercial treaties with the United States, Groat Britain, and Japan the Government of China' has indicated its intention of reforming its monetary system. It has further given public expression to its intention by decrees commanding high financial officials to prepare a plan of reform by sonding a commission to Japan to consider the monetary system of that country, and by 4 memorandum presented to the Govern-mont of the United States asking its ce-operation in carrying out such a reform.
The neod for such a movement is clear. Anyone who has had occasion to travel in the interior of China realises how groat the confusion in the monetary system ji While larger transactions are almost always carried on in terms of taels, those taels vary not merely in different provinces but in different cities of the same province, such variations being both in Weight and in the touch of the metal, for all taels are in reality but a fixed weight of silver of a certain degree of fineness. Besides the variations in the silver taels in uso in different parts of the country, there are found also great variations in the uso of copper cash. For example in Poking in earlier times ton-cash pieces had been coined which, at the present time, have the value of two. In other cases for every ten cash of the ordinary size and weight, one lighter cash will be inserted. The number of cash in the string likewise varies from some 50 to nearly a thousand. A person buying cash in the morning for silver may very easily within a day's walk find himself at night in a place in which the number of cash given for a taol of silver would be 60 different both in number and quality as practically to amount to a now coinage. In several provinces silver dollars are coined; elsewhere Mexican and Hongkong dollars are used, and in some place seven Russian rubles circulate. The effect of this confusion in the monetary system cannot fail to be extremely detrimental to trade in the interior.
The situation as regards foreign trade is little, if any, better. Naturally the transactions in Shanghai are of greater
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.