Page:The Truth about China and Japan - Weale - 1919.djvu/134

 Boards—fully centralized and fully defined—all matters which are justly the objects of their official concern. Publication of facts and figures should have been substituted for haggling about details—not hypothecation or alien control, but organization should have been the goal. The Ministry of Finance, with its many foreign Bond Issues, should not only have direct and absolute control over the four great sources of revenue, Customs, Salt, Land-tax, and Wine and Tobacco, but should have been stimulated into issuing proper quarterly statements in Chinese and English, thus bringing light into dark places. There should not have been a constant policy of frightening the Chinese with visions of a Foreign Debt Bureau under foreign control on the Egyptian-Turkish model. A real Chinese service of the national debt, in place of the present semi-foreign pawnbroking methods; a proper currency system, with token coins and bank-notes maintained at parity—these these things would be far more beneficial to the world at large than spheres of influence, or personal victories signalized by the appointment of favoured nationals to sinecures. At present all these questions are inextricably and hopelessly confused; but inasmuch as the provisional suspension of the Boxer indemnities