Jan. 29.
Recent telegrams from Peking state that the demand for the establishment of a mint at Shanghai, first put forward at the recent conference of British Chambers of Commerce and subsequently reinforced by the Nanking mint's deliberately starving Shanghai of dollars in order to send up their price, has borne fruit. Unfortunately, the scheme og at present outlined is not such as to meet the real needs of the case. The equipment of the mint appears, from the short description received, to be all that it should be, with the necessarily up-to-date machinery capable of producing nearly, if not quite, as many dollars daily as it is calculated are necessary. But this part of the plan is a side issue. The important point for criticism is that the mint would be under the exclusive control of the Currency Commission, and, as such, it is to be feared that it would not command that universal confidence which is indispensable to the ends it is meant to serve.
It must again be emphasized that the purpose of establishing an efficient and properly controlled mint in Shanghai is only in a very secondary degree to prevent this important market from being suddenly deprived of dollars at the caprice of speculators. The great object is to substitute a dollar coinage throughout China for the present cumbrous and wasteful tael system. It is unnecessary to dwell on the disadvantages to trade resulting from the different values in the so-called currency prevailing in every province, the inconvenience and loss that result from the necessary calculation of exchange and the expense of continually moving silver from-one province to another to adjust balances. These things are a commonplace to every business man, and have been the stock-in-trade of every advocate of a gold currency. The expense to China, of so great a change as that, however, has turned reformers' thoughts in another direction and it is argued with unanswerable force that, if China possessed a standard silver coinage of identical value from one end of the country to the other, the bulk of her inter-provincial trade is so great that the disadvantages of a currency liable to fluctuate in comparison with that of foreign countries might temporarily be ignored: China's internal trade is and for some time to come is likely to remain of infinitely greater importance to her than her foreign; and there can be no question that a uniform currency, the same for the merchant in Shanghai and the silk-grower of Szechuan, for the camel driver of Tartary and the fisherman of the Chusan archipelago, would prove an inestimable boon. Commerce would be stimulated, revenue would increase and a fund might be established, against the day when China's foreign trade should have grown to dimensions worthy of her size, for the desired conversion to a gold standard. To this end the way is already being paved by the increasing popularity of the dollar. All the accounts of the Salt Gabelle, whose receipts amount to. over seventy millions a year, are in dollars. The same coin is extensively used in large commercial transactions throughout Manchuria and North China, in all the coast. provinces and along the Yangtze Valley. At present, however, there are too many mints and too many differing values of dollar, and while they have on the whole ieaintained a fairly even level of fineness, they cannot be accepted as a substitute for sycee nor would they alone secure those advantages of a uniform currency throughout the country which are so greatly te be desired.
What is required is a coin in which the foreign banks would be able to feel such confidence that they would be willing to change their accounts from taels to dollars. And te that end it is indispensable that the new mint should be placed wuder the management of one of the departments in Peking in which foreign advice plays a predominant part. To say that is to say nce more than is widely recognized by both Chinese business men and officials. That the dollars produced at Nanking, Hankow and Tientsin have hitherto kept up their value is largely, if not solely, due to the unvarying purity of sycee. But if the latter were displaced, the temptation to tamper with the dollar might prove irresistible. Already there are signs that the dollar is beginning to fall from its high estate. The last batch of coins sent to be assayed at the Bombay. Mint showed a slight but unmistakable decline as compared with previous testings. The profits on. minting at present enjoyed are so considerable that the mint interest is very
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.