Слике страница
PDF
ePub

I have already noticed that if there is any Defect of a Person to preside in the absence of the Governor-General or the President of the other settlements it ought to be remedied.

H. D.

The

7. Great inconvenience arises from no provision being made in the Act of Parliament for sittings in Council without the actual presence of the Governor or Governor-General, so that if the Governor happens to be indisposed or occupied by business of a more urgent nature, the current affairs of the Government must be stopped until he is able to be personally present in Council. expedient of naming a Vice-President under the present Law cannot be used in such cases without much inconvenience. It would therefore be useful to make a provision that in the absence of the GovernorGeneral the Senior Members of Council (or the Vice Presidents under the new Law) should preside, but that if the Governor or GovernorGeneral should then be residing at the Presidency, no Act in the Council should be valid until signed by him.

[ocr errors]

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CURRENCY IN THE FAR EAST.*

BY LIEUT.-COL. R. C. TEMPLE, C.I.E., CHIEF COMMISSIONER, ANDAMANS AND NICOBARS.

THE development from its commencement of the currency in any given part of the world is always a very wide subject, and would require far more time for its elucidation than is contained within the allotted limits of a single article. I will therefore merely now say, as regards the earlier and more primitive forms of currency known to exist, or to have existed, in the world, that they are all to be found in the East; where indeed, the details of the whole scale of any form of civilization are to be found coexistent at any given period. It is this in fact that makes study in India and the East so fascinating the existence side by side, in their crudest and most patent manifestations, of the earliest and latest forms of all things human.

Academically and popularly the most interesting part of the study of my subject unquestionably lies in its earlier stages. They are certain to rouse curiosity, and I feel that I should be sure of exciting interest, if I were to dilate now upon the rise of currency and coinage, step by step, from barter pure and simple, by examples culled from the Far East; if I were to trace the rise of the conception of standards of weight as applied to metals used for money, i.e., Troy weight, from rude measures of capacity, by examples similarly culled; if I were to show how and why, not only the conceptions, but the very terminology of Troy weight, currency and coinage are inextricably mixed up in the Oriental mind; if I were to state in detail the great array of articles that have been used in the Far East as currency, which are not bullion, and to explain their use; if I were to point out how the currency of the cubic contents of non-bullion money, measured by size, preceded

* For the discussion on this paper, see "Proceedings of the East India Association," elsewhere in this Review.-Ed.

and steadily led to the currency of the cubic contents of bullion money, measured by weight,

It is possible to show directly from data still procurable in the East, that the idea of currency arose before those of Troy weight and coined money, and to explain how it arose. It is possible thus to show also how the terminology devised for conventional cubic measures of articles commonly required was transferred to the weights of the metals for which they could be bartered, and thus to the currency. It is possible further to show why, to the vast majority of the Oriental world, currency means the conventional weights of the exchange metals, and coins have no commercial meaning at all, except in their relation to the weights of the pieces of metal of which they are composed.

For the present purpose I have to insist on this last point. It is quite impossible to separate the terms for currency and Troy weight in the Far East, and the history of the development of the one is the same thing as the history of the development of the other. The most practical and the clearest way to treat the question is as one of the history of Troy weight.

Interesting and exceedingly picturesque as the details of the points I have thus very briefly referred to would be, I am obliged to pass on quickly to that part of the subject which it is my immediate object now to discuss the development of the forms of currency in the Far East existing at the present day, and bearing an established relation to coined money or to bullion. It is the most difficult, and in an academical sense the least interesting, but I hope that it will be conceded that it is by far the most important part of my general subject.

To make myself quite clear in the remarks that follow, I wish to explain that by Troy weight I mean the conventional standard weights of the exchange metals, i.e., of bullion. By currency I mean what our forefathers used to call Imaginary or Ideal Money, i.e., money of account or exchange-the means by which the commercial world is

[ocr errors]

able to balance its books. By money, as differing from currency, I mean what was of old called Real Money, i.e., coins or tokens of credit convertible into property.

With these remarks I will now attack our present problems, asking for the reader's kind and close attention. I do this because the argument has to be so close, and the 'subject is so difficult, that I cannot help it.

I must begin by stating that all the existing Troy weights and currencies in India and the Far East are based on one, and sometimes on both, of two seeds, which are known to Europeans as the seeds of the Abrus precatorius and the Adenanthera pavonina. I must ask that these two names be borne in mind, and I will call them in my arguments the abrus and the adenanthera. The abrus is a lovely little creeper yielding a small bright red seed with a black spot on it. The adenanthera is a great deciduous pod-bearing tree, having a bright red seed. Conventionally the adenanthera seed is double of the abrus seed. Now, as will be presently seen, our subject literally bristles with every kind of difficulty, and here, at the very beginning, is the first. The weights represented by the two seeds have everywhere and at all times been mixed up. The terms for the abrus and its conventional representatives have been applied to the adenanthera, and vice versa, both by native writers and European translators and reporters. As a result of the same kind of confusion of mind, whole systems of currency have been borrowed from outside by half-civilized and ill-informed rulers and Governments, and brought arbitrarily into existence, starting on the wrong foot, as it were. The unlimited muddle thus arising may be easily imagined, and so, too, may the amount of investigation necessary to unravel the resultant tangle.

With this preliminary information as to the fundamental basis thereof, let us proceed to inquire into the Indian Troy weight system, because I hope to show that the whole currency of the Far East is based on it, or is at least directly connected with it.

Based on the conventional abrus seed, there were in

ancient, or at any rate in old, i.e., in undiluted Hindu, India, two concurrent Troy scales, which, for the present purpose, I will call the literary and the popular scales. For the present purpose also, and for the sake of clearness, I will call the abrus seed of convention in the literary scale by one of its many ancient names, raktikâ, and in the popular scale by one of its many modern names, ratî.

In the Indian Troy scales, then, the lower denominations represented in each case the abrus seed, but the upper denominations differed greatly; ie., in the literary scale there were 320 raktikâs to the pala, and in the popular scale there were 96 ratîs to the tôla. These facts are presented in the old books, and in innumerable reports of local and general scales spread over many centuries, in a most bewildering maze of forms and details, but it may be taken from one who has studied them for years that they are essentially as above stated.

I have differentiated the concurrent scales by the titles. of literary and popular, because the former is that which alone is to be found in the classical books, and the latter is the scale which the Muhammadan conquerors found to be everywhere in use on their irruptions in the eleventh and subsequent centuries of the Christian Era. That the two scales were actually concurrent for many centuries is shown by the antiquity of some of the works in which the literary scale is quoted, by the fact that the details of the popular scale are traceable to the old Greek scales, at any rate clearly in part, and by the quotations of both concurrently for purely mathematical purposes by the author of the Lilavati in the twelfth century.

Permit me now to ask for special attention to what I. have just stated, viz., the existence in India of two concurrent Troy scales-a literary one of 320 raktikas to the pala, and a popular one of 96 ratîs to the tôlâ. I do so because it is on this cardinal fact that the coming arguments are based.

Now, as might be expected, it is the popular scale that the practical Muhammadan conquerors caught up, shifting

« ПретходнаНастави »