The fact that to-morrow the pound sterling will be placed on a. parity with the gold dollar as fay asthe postal service between Britain and Ametica is concerned is of outstanding importance, and we shall surely not be far wrong if we take it as heralding a definite return to the exchange parity. The telegrams on the subject of the restoration of Great Brita' ye ney to a gold basi naturally, been extremely limited In their scope, for the: very. good reason that the British and. American financiers engaged in the dis-Cussion have given nothing away which would." Serve to prompt Specslition on the" international money. market, What has. transpired, however, shows that Amer-tean financial houses have so, mock confidence in British "credit. that they are prepared to place gold the disposal of the Ben of Eng. Tand\ should this "be necessary any time to maintain the gold basis. The position in Great. Britain is that there Te a total of just under -£300,000,000 of Treasury notes of 41 and 10 shillings denomination circulation, against which there are the following: Gold coin and bullion, $27,000,000:" silver" enim 7,000,000: Bank of England notes, £22480,000: Government. securities, £243,078600: balance at Banke of England, $159,880. "The total these balances the amount of notes issued. Te" is seen; accordingly, that for all practical purposes the ud footing, but there old, the actual. precious metal, in the country' to. meet, Te'ls stated that gold will by the Bank of England for all their notes and Treasury notes as well, but everybody knows that this works better in theory than in years. What the country, of course, has is securities to meet the note issue, but as will readily be understood these are not readily converted into liquid form. Now for years the Bank of Eng. Iand has financed other banks, the Scottish ones for instance, with' note issues of their own, and' what has happened to-day is apparently that New York will do exactly the same for London if called upon. By this arrangement a return to the gold standard becomes. practicable, The Bradbury With reference to the restoration of the pound to a gold basis, it will be of interest to note how the Far East takes it. We are not at the: moment concerned with the exchange banks and those who deal with exchange in large quantities, but with those eminently useful individuals who make a living somewhere between Port Said and Singapore, taking in Aden and all the other intermediate ports in their business routine. To them the Treasury Note has been a blessing, for it has enabled them to carry on transactions of some magnitude probably beyond who! it was possible in the gold days—the days when nothing but Bank of England notes and sovereigns were in vogue. To-day they can send hundreds of pounds by post 'Treasury Notes to their correspondents in other ports at the smallest possible cost to themselves, and meet whatever demand is likely to occur by, say, the arrival of a steamer from' the Far East at Colombo or wherever it may be. Considering that some steamers at Colombo take as much as £2,000 in cash in exchange for other cur-rendes, this is an important facility, and it' may be queried how far these dealers will welcome any return to the sovereign. However that may be, the position of the Treasury Note during these past four or five years in the East is very important. It has held place from London to Yokohama comparable with the gold sovereign, suffering only the same deprecia nas it had to face against gold parity. These money changers, tone would say knowing something of their transactions, are among the shrewdest people in the world, and the fact that they have done such a trade in Treasury Notes a tribute to the soundness of British national finance, A Lost Industry:
One can only regret that what!
year ago seemed like a promising new local industry has come to a premature death. We have two or three good foreign dairies Shanghai, but not sufficient of them and one would have thought that anything that could be done to strengthen them or to build up others of a like nature would have Jbeen given every encouragement. Messrs. J. Noble and D. G, Phillips [thought.so, and they imported fairly. large test consignment. of
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.