Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 5.djvu/26

 Public works had been inaugurated on a considerable scale. Many industrial enterprises had been started under official auspices as object-lessons for the people, and large sums in aid of similar projects had been lent to private persons. Thus the Government, living far beyond its income, had unavoidable recourse to further issues of fiat paper, and in proportion as the volume of the latter exceeded the actual currency requirements of the time, its value depreciated, until, in 1881, fourteen years after the Restoration, notes to the face value of 150,000,000 yen had been put into circulation, and eighteen paper yen could be purchased with ten silver coins of the same denomination. On the other hand, the treasury held only 8,000,000 yen in specie, or about one-nineteenth of its total note issues, and no prospect of a return to hard-money payments could be discerned by the public. The Government indeed was not without a sense of its responsibilities. Fitful efforts had been made to strengthen the specie value of the fiat paper by purchasing quantities of it from time to time, an operation which inured chiefly to the benefit of speculators on 'change, and large sums—totalling 23,000,000 yen—had been devoted to the promotion of various industries in the hope that their products would go to swell the list of exports and thus draw gold and silver into the country. But, in 1881, it became evident that these superficial devices must be abandoned, and