With copper cents at 170 to the dollar, 20-cone pieces showing here and there a tendency to depreciate, and the provinces so alarmed that they are beginning to take steps to prevent an influx of anything even remotely suggestive of light weight, foreigners can have little confidence in any new proposal relating to coinage matters in China. We read in the "Eastern Times" that one of China's finanders has come forward with the proposal that antimony should be used in the minting of coins instead of silver, and we cannot help wondering what may be at the back of his mind. It is perhaps nothing more than that he notes the steady inflow of silver into the country; and ai the same time sees the weekly exports of antimony from the western part of the Yangtze Valley, and desires that China may not be dependent on foreign sources for her supplies of a commercial medium. He may have leeper designs, a desire to upset the operation of the Pittman Act for instance, or to create pani among the speculators who in th daily operations succeed in obstructing the trafic of ordinary mortals in Kiukiang Road. There is probably no good reason why antimony should not. be used as currency medium, for if nickel is popular in many parts of the world for smal] denominations, antimony might be equally.so. The thing is that having suffered much from the vagaries of coinage induced by officials whose sense of enterprise is more pronounced than their sense of weight and quantity, we are in no mood to trust to antimony or any other new-fangled device until we know its inner purpose and that its minting will be carried out on proper lines.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.