FINANCIAL CONDITIONS
came, in the autumn of that year, an accomplished fact.
Viewed by the light of results, the above facts constitute a fine economical feat, nor can it be denied that the statesmen who directed Japan's finances at that critical time showed clear insight, good organising capacity, and courageous energy. While these events were in progress, however, they elicited a great deal of adverse criticism from Europeans and Americans. Many onlooking strangers were prepared each with an infallible nostrum of his own, the rejection of which convinced him of Japan's hopeless stupidity. Now, she was charged with robbing her own people because she bought their goods at home with paper money and sold them abroad for specie; again, she was accused of an official conspiracy to ruin the foreign local banks because she purchased exporters' bills on Europe and America at rates that defied ordinary competition; and while some declared that she was plainly without any understanding of her own doings, others, averring that she could not possibly extricate herself from the slough of an inflated and largely depreciated fiat currency without recourse to European capital, predicted that her heroic method of dealing with the problem would paralyse industry, interrupt trade, produce wide-spread suffering, and, in short, bring about the advent of the proverbial "seven other devils." Undoubtedly, to carry the currency of a nation from a discount of fifty or sixty
9
