284 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY. 



other way of curing the abuse than that of abolishing the use, and we 

 should not have been reminded by this throwing away of the enormous 

 advantages possibly to be derived from a well handled government 

 credit, of the wasteful process described by Charles Lamb, through 

 which the delicacy of roast pig was provided in China. 



Paper Money in Europe and America 



A word ought perhaps to be said, in closing, concerning the experi- 

 ence in the use of paper money in Christendom which most closely 

 parallels that of the Chinese. It will help us to appreciate the indefi- 

 nite past with which we have been dealing in China, if we recall the 

 fact that the Bank of England was not chartered until 1694, A.D., and 

 while claims are made that continental banks had anticipated that 

 date in furnishing a paper currency to the people, these claims if 

 proved would not carry back the birth of paper money in Europe 

 by many years. Two hundred and forty years had intervened between 

 the time set by Klaproth for the Chinese abandonment of paper money 

 and the attempt in Europe to inaugurate the use of a representative 

 denominational paper currency. It was not, therefore, until about a 

 thousand years after emission of the oldest note of which we have 

 heard in China, that the conditions of life in Europe led to the develop- 

 ment of a system of paper money. Experiences in the imprudent 

 use of the power to furnish a circulating medium through the means of 

 the printing press, led to catastrophes like Law's Mississippi bubble 

 and later to the depreciation of the government paper of some of the 

 continental powers, but the one experience which most closely re- 

 sembles that of the Chinese was that of the Province of Massachusetts 

 Bay in the first half of the eighteenth century. Our ancestors com- 

 pressed within the brief space of about fifty years, practically coinci- 

 dent with the first half of the eighteenth century, an experience in 

 the use of fiat money, which rivals the Chinese experiment in the 

 variety of the lessons which it can teach, and is in reality far more 

 instructive than its prototype, since we have complete records of the 

 details of action, the methods of emission and the surrounding condi- 

 tions of life. We can see here, the timid efforts of a government, 

 having no borrowing power, to meet a debt, relatively very large and 

 utterly unexpected, by the emission of certificates of indebtedness, 

 in the form of a denominational currency, capable of being made use 



