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TABLE N.-Showing disappearance and reappearance of the currency.

CORRECT TO THE NEAREST TEN THOUSAND (FOUR 0000's OMITTED).

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Melting for the arts

1,000 1,000 1,000 1,000 1,000 1,000 1,000 1,000 1,000 1,000 1,000 1,000

,000

1,000 1,000

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Registered import by sea

Unregistered import from Ceylon.

180

97

88

595 418 491 1,033 623 436 557 506 596 510 34 110

74

70

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កូន :

712 358 318

61

60

58

54

66

66

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726

638 826

503

460

755

662

NOTES.-The unregistered export to Mauritius has been omitted as being insignificant; the reappearance from hoards has been omitted, as the amount is not ascertainable, and can have little or no effect on the calculations based upon these figures. The figures in italics are averaged from succeeding years' figures, with the exception of those for Arabia, which have been reduced for the years prior to Messrs. Cook and Son taking over the pilgrim traffic,

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half a crore of this annual disappearance was due to melting. Since then the population has probably increased by 30 per cent., and its material wealth still more rapidly, whereas the balance of imported bullion available for the arts has not been large. It is therefore probable that for the present time an estimate of a crore of rupees annually melted is within the truth. Personally, I am of opinion that the consumption is considerably greater; but in making estimates where guessing, more or less scientific, predominates, it is better to understate the truth.

Having now touched upon the causes of disappearance and reappearance of the rupee, it will be convenient to exhibit all the figures in one table (p. 749).

The next step necessary is to determine the composition of these totals.

The sea export is mainly from Bombay, and may therefore be taken to be of about the same composition as the coin circulating in that Presidency. The inland export has been supposed to consist of something between the Simla and Darjeeling circulation and that of the western frontier.

Hoarding falls mainly on the older coin, and may, perhaps; be calculated upon the Central Provinces average. Accidental loss and remintage are taken at the combined average. Loss from melting, if regard be had to the supposed fact that one-third takes place in large cities and the rest in the interior and hills, probably falls on a circulation somewhat older than the combined average by which I have computed it.

Reappearance may be taken to be in each case of export from stratas of coin one year older than those affected by the export.

It will be seen that no attempt has been made to vary the figures for hoarding and melting according to the prosperity of the year, although in a year of scarcity considerable quantities of old coin must reappear from hoards, and new coin must suffer less loss from melting and hoarding.

Some of the figures given upon page 736 in Table I have been corrected upon these lines, and are given on the following page.

1 For the composition of the circulation in different places, see Appendices B . and G.

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NOTE.-As the census of the coin takes place in May, the year of taking it has been taken into consideration. Thus, in the case of the 1890 figure, calculated upon the second year, the deduction has been based on two years and five-twelfths.

It is interesting to compare these estimates with those in Tables G and K for the same years :

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It will serve no good purpose at present to carry these estimates any further, in the absence of a searching criticism on the methods adopted. My own belief is that these figures slightly over-estimate the mass of rupees at present existing in India. F. C. HARRISON

1 The number of rupees circulating in the respective years is found by multiplying each figure in the text by ten million.

The Editor regrets that he is obliged by want of space to postpone to next number the remainder of the paper, in which the author takes account of the coin lying unissued in the Government reserves, estimates the volume of National mintages, and supports his conclusions by copious appendices, to many of which reference has been made above.

REVIEWS

The Origin of Property in Land. By FUSTEL DE COULANGES. Translated by MARGARET ASHLEY. With an introductory chapter on the English Manor, by W. J. ASHLEY, M.A., Professor of Political Economy in the University of Toronto. (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co. 1891.)

MRS. ASHLEY has done good service to the English reader in translating this important essay upon the origin of property in land. That land in primitive times was held in common by the tribe or village, had settled almost into an axiom of economic history. M. Fustel de Coulanges did not attempt to prove that there had never been such a thing as agrarian communism; he only aimed at showing that the evidence upon which it has been admitted is totally insufficient. With this object he examined the authorities cited by such writers as Von Maurer, Professor Mommsen, M. Viollet, and M. de Laveleye. The results of that examination appear in the essay now translated. It would be absurd to pronounce confidently between these distinguished disputants without having scrutinised the sources from which they quote. But M. Fustel de Coulanges, it must be confessed, has reopened an enquiry which apparently had been almost concluded. The whole body of evidence as to primitive forms of property in land will have to be reconsidered. It is against Von Maurer and the theory of the mark, that M. de Coulanges points his heaviest battery. He denies that the notices of German usage, which we find in Cæsar and Tacitus, afford any reason for believing in the existence of the mark. Certainly he appears to be correct as against Von Maurer in denying that the word 'ager' in these writers is to be taken as the equivalent of ager publicus.' Arva per annos mutant' he observes, does not mean they annually exchange lands with one another,' but they annually shift their cultivated fields to a new part of the territory.' Great inequalities of condition, he insists, distinct classes of nobles, freemen, serfs, and slaves, present themselves in the very earliest periods of German history. The division of the soil, effected at a later period by the German conquerors in the Roman provinces, he plausibly maintains to

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have been a division made once for all and giving rise to full private property. Coming down to a still later period, which affords the collections of laws and of charters quoted by Von Maurer as establishing the existence of the mark, M. de Coulanges complains that Von Maurer has ignored the far more copious proof which they afford of the existence of private property in land. M. de Coulanges cites many passages to show that in these records the term mark is used merely to signify a boundary or the land included within a boundary. In these records the gift, sale, and devise, of lands, are fully recognised. The references to common forest, or to common pasture, on examination, testify to nothing more than such cases of joint ownership by two or three persons, as may be found in all ages, or to common enjoyment by the serfs or tenants of a lord who owned both the arable and the waste land. In dismissing Von Maurer, M. de Coulanges sums up as follows :-'Go over the innumerable quotations at the bottom of the pages of his book: more than two-thirds relate to private property; of the rest, some hundreds are concerned with minor points unconnected with the subject; not a single one touches the main question, or if there are any which at first sight appear to do so, the slightest examination shows that they have been misunderstood and misinterpreted' (p. 61).

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M. Viollet and M. de Laveleye, in so far as they build upon Greek or Roman authorities are still more severely handled. M. de Coulanges rightly treats the inference from the poetical age of gold to primitive communism in land as unwarrantable euhemerism, the vain attempt to distil history from mythology. Moreover, as he remarks, the age gold is always represented as an age, not of cultivation, but of idleness; an age of spontaneous plenty in which every one had more than enough, and no property, whether collective or individual, could arise. The more historical authorities quoted in favour of collective ownership of land by the primitive Greeks or Italians, he shows to be equally insufficient. The common meals of Sparta were not furnished out of the produce of common land, since we know that common meals were introduced into Sparta at a time when private property had already been established, and that, as time went on, many Spartans were excluded from the common meals because they were too poor to make any contribution. The communism recommended by Plato, and established by Pythagoras, was clearly exceptional, a philosophic freak at variance with the universal habits of Greek life. The restrictions upon sale or devise of land so frequent in early Greek law, were intended to protect the rights of the family, not of the community, which would. not have suffered by one citizen transferring to another his interest in the common land. Finally the bulk of the evidence adduced in favour of Greek agrarian communism is ludicrously small when we consider how much evidence can be adduced on the other side. 'Every authority ought to be consulted, the whole of Greek literature ought to be studied, in treating of such a problem as M. Viollet's' (p. 95). Alike No. 4.-VOL. I 3 с

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