policy of the Gracchi demanded heavy additional expenditure. The Senate would have preferred to reject the policy in toto; failing that, it was reluctant either to allocate special funds towards its execution, or to draw upon the reserve; the situation must be dealt with by inflation of the coinage in the form of debasement of the denarius. The M. Livius Drusus, who in his tribunate "mixed an eighth part of copper with the silver," was, almost certainly, the rival of Gaius Gracchus, not his son, the tribune of B.C. 91. The democrats, on the other hand, saw no reason why the wealthy State should not come to the rescue of its poorer citizens either by allocating to their relief special revenues, such as those of the province of Asia, or by drawing on the ample reserves in the treasury. The coinage must not be tampered with. The democratic policy certainly appears to be the sounder of the two; but the real reason why it was adopted was undoubtedly the alliance with the banking and financial interests, which had a professional objection to inflation. In B.C. 118, when the democrats, rallying after the murder of C. Gracchus, carried their scheme for the foundation of the colony of Narbo Martius in Gaul, they celebrated the occasion by a great issue of serrated denarii-denarii with cuts all round the edge, designed to show that the heart of the coin was of silver; the favourite form of debasement at the time seems to have been the issue of plated denarii, with a core of base metal under a thin envelope of silver. The fight over the coinage ran with varying results for more than a generation. The wars against the northern barbarians and against Jugurtha gave rise to further debasement, and also to drafts on the reserve. When Marius, a pronounced democrat, came into power to finish off the Cimbrian War, the serrated coinage of pure silver reappeared. But in B.C. 100 the Senate succeeded in splitting the democratic party, and the moderates under Marius actually helped to suppress the extreme faction under Saturninus. The stoppage of the issues of serrati marked the triumph of the Senate. Ten years later the outbreak of the great Social War brought forward the old issue in an acute form. The war was fought out in Italy; it demanded enormous expenditure, and it brought in little in the way of spoils. The Senate revived its policy of the third century. The as, the unit of reckoning, was reduced by a half, from an ounce to half an ounce. The denarius was debased to such an extent that no one could tell what his holdings were really worth. Whether the denarius was retariffed in terms of the new as or whether debased denarii and light asses were allowed to circulate at the old rates is not evident from our authorities. The loss of Asia to Mithridates made a bad situation even worse. Prices rose with astounding rapidity, debtors appealed in desperation for some form of protection, the whole money market was reduced to hopeless confusion. For these disasters the Senate must bear a heavy share of the blame. Judging from the huge treasury resources that were still in existence, years after the Social War, we may fairly ask whether the Senate did not husband its resources in too miserly a manner; and, even if inflation was necessary, debasement of the silver was the most dangerous form that it could take. At any rate, the democrats who came into power in B.C. 87, when Sulla was in the East, reversed the whole policy. They issued no more halfounce asses, but simply suspended the coinage of bronze. The denarius was now to be the dominant coin and its quality was restored; serrated denarii were again issued. But, though the coinage was thus restored, there remained the question of the intolerable burden of public and private debt. It was resolved for once to cut the Gordian knot and, by a measure which only the desperate can have welcomed, three parts in four of all debts were cancelled.* With the return and triumph of Sulla a reaction set in. The serrated denarius was no longer issued, and a Lex Cornelia laid down the principle that the official coinage must be accepted at its tariff value. M. Marius Gratidianus, the praetor, who had won immense popularity by separating the good from the bad silver, was brutally murdered. The victory of the Senate with its evil policy of inflation was complete. The last fifty years of the Roman Republic present several features of surpassing interest, which we can only mention here in passing the growth of a semi-independent coinage of generals in the provinces, which paved the way for the imperial coinage, and the competition of the Roman currency with native currencies in East and West. We must be content simply to follow out the lines of enquiry on which we have already embarked. The Senate *This was the Lex Valeria under which only a quadrans in the as was paid. Within two years, we hear, its author paid for his action with his life. had successfully asserted its right to debase the silver coinage at its discretion. Serrated denarii were only issued after B.C. 81 by the remnants of the Marian faction under Sertorius in Spain and, it appears, by Julius Cæsar in Gaul, where the preference of the natives for good silver may have supplied some cover for the resumption of a defeated policy. The fact that, among the later serrati, plated coins are not uncommon shows that they had outlived their real use. The Senate, however, used its triumph with a certain measure of discretion. The as of the half-ounce standard was not revived. Silver replaced bronze as the standard metal, and beside the silver, the gold piece, struck originally only in the provinces, from Julius Cæsar onwards also in Rome, began to rank as a standard coin. A nominal system of mono-metallism in bronze was giving place to bimetallism in gold and silver. Debasement of the silver was kept within reasonable limits. The bitter experiences of B.C. 90 to 80 had not been entirely lost either on Senate or on knights. The Senate realised the danger of interfering too seriously with the coinage of a highly developed State. The knights began to draw away in alarm from their more extreme allies in the democratic party. Once in extreme need they had countenanced the direct repudiation of a large proportion of all debts. So easy a remedy for financial distress was not soon forgotten by the desperate, and the cry for novæ tabulæ (cancellation of debts) was again and again raised. Against the party of anarchy, which threatened to open up a chasm beneath their feet, senators and knights drew together in a concordia ordinum, an alliance of the propertied classes against the impoverished masses. Even the colossal expenses of the great civil wars did not lead to the tampering with coinage that we might have expected. The democrats under Julius Cæsar were opposed to it in principle and had access to the reserves of the Roman treasury. The senatorial party in the provinces had more need of a coinage of good metal and could draw for their supplies on the still unexhausted resources of the East. The final struggles of Antony and Octavian, first with the tyrannicides, then with one another, left the treasury depleted and Italy and the provinces alike exhausted. But the victorious Octavian (surnamed by the Senate, Augustus) found no fatal precedent to bar him from the realisation of one of the best principles of the democratic party, and the establishment of a sound coinage was one of the main foundations of his Empire. HAROLD MATTINGLY I. 2. 3. PIONEER DAYS IN CHINA The Chronicles of the East India Company trading in China. By The Chater Collection: a catalogue of pictures relating to China, 1919. " THE Chronicles of the East India Company Trading in China" form a notable addition to Mr. Morse's scholarly researches into the trade and foreign relations of the Chinese Empire since the earliest days of its relations with the West. Compiled by permission of the India Office from the records of the Hon. East India Company (ships' diaries, council's consultations and instructions of the Court of Directors) these volumes supply a record in chronological order of the history of the Company's traffics and discoveries in China, from the middle of the seventeenth century to the date of the abrogation of the Company's charter in 1833. In this record there occurs one serious gap, viz., the period from 1754 to 1774, of which all the archives are missing; an unfortunate and unexplained loss, the more remarkable because the documents must have been at the disposal of Mr. Peter Auber, Secretary to the Company's Court of Directors, when he wrote his work on China in 1834. Until 1754, the records consisted solely of the diaries kept by the supercargoes of individual ships, documents which contain, as a rule, little beyond the bare details of cargoes and trade; but from 1775 to 1786, the Canton records of the Council of super-cargoes, and thereafter of the Select Committee, give a graphic, and at times a dramatic, account of the doings and dealings of the Company's agents in China. From these records, Mr. Morse has extracted " every fact which could be of economic value to the student of the commercial history of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries." In so doing, he has confined himself strictly to the materials with which he is dealing and to the history of the development of the Company's trading operations. The narrative thus compiled is, generally speaking, uncommentated and contains few references to the works of contemporary writers. The scope of Mr. Morse's work is, in fact, exactly indicated by its title. Nevertheless, the tale which it unfolds is one of unquestionable value, not only to students of commercial history, but to everyone who takes an interest in Far Eastern affairs. It is a tale which must needs cause us to reflect on the present conflict between East and West, not in terms of places and days, but of continents and centuries, a salutary exercise all too frequently neglected, as times go, by those in whose hands lies the direction of affairs. Nothing in those chronicles was written with an eye either to posterity or to the gallery; they contain nothing but the unvarnished reports addressed, in good plain English, to the Court of Directors by the chief super-cargoes at Canton for a period of nearly two hundred years. It is a tale, all unadorned, of unceasing struggles and hardships, gallantly endured by the staunch pioneers who well and truly laid the foundations of Great Britain's commercial and political prestige in the Far East. These things written aforetime were written for our learning. "Not only do they bring to light,'" as Hakluyt says, " antiquities smothered and buried in dark silence, and preserve certain memorable exploits, by our English nation achieved, from the greedy and devouring jaws of oblivion; not only do they incorporate into one body the torn and scattered limbs of our ancient and late navigations by sea, our voyages by land and traffics of merchandise by both "; but they point more than one moral most pertinent at the present juncture of Far Eastern affairs. The value of these chronicles lies chiefly in the unbroken continuity which they present of persistent causes and effects; the light which they throw upon the fundamental differences between East and West is not the brief candle of individual impressions, but a steadily burning lamp of garnered knowledge, handed down from one generation to another, by clear-sighted mariners and traders. It is nearly a century since the East India Company's monopoly of trade came to an end, and on the surface the China of to-day strikes the casual observer as very different from the Celestial Empire of 1834. He who studies these chronicles, however, will find that the problems which now confront the Englishman in China are intrinsically the same, in their inveterate origins and broad results, as they were before the first British Minister VOL. 244. NO. 497. K |