In almost every house in Peking that boasts red double doors, there are neatly tied up packets of treasury notes, bonds that were not consolidated and secured, promissory paper of every sort, which repose in the same spare room with broken furniture, clothes in gay colours out of fashion and the household's dragon flag.
Every Mongol and Manchu potentate has a chest full of the Chinese Republic's promises to pay. The total face value of such paper, cheerfully issued because each incumbent's successors would have the job of meeting it or of explaining -why ib could not be met, but received with less humility and grace from year to year, runs into more temerity to estimate.
Mr. Liu En-yuan's suggestion of new bond issues to meet obligations on the annual pay day was, there-sion. Ge discovered in a painfully fore, greeted with shouts of derishort time that high finance was not so simple as it looked. He found that if he were ever going to be in a position to congratulate himself upon having passed a New Year satisfactorily, he would have to scrape together a few milliona in hard silver and, like so many Ministers before. him, he saw as he scanned the landscape nothing above the arid dead level but the proceeds of taxes administered and collected by foreigners. The Salt surplus and the Customs surplus were the only tangible possibilities. A Salt surplus was overdue. That made the situation look a little brighter for the moment. And for another moment, painfully fleeting, it looked as though the Customs surplus, the security for the consolidated domestic loans, might be pillaged.
Whatever plans were being evolu ved ten days ago for meeting obtrammeled mind to the problems} ligations at the end of-the Chinese lunar year out of Salt and Oustoms receipts were sadly upset by. {Sir Francis Aglen's published statement of the revenues available for the service of the domestic bond issues, and by the action of the French and Japanese Legations in withholding the release of the December Salt surplus which still lies in the Banque de ]'Indo-Chine {and the Yokohania Specie Bank.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.