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importation of Bar Silver by the imposition of a duty
But that seems
31
to prohibit its free import altogether.
to me a contingency of the future. The first step is
the unification of the currency and it may take years to
change in this respect the national customs of centuries.
It would be difficult 1 think to exaggerate the
importance to Hongkong of the stops taken by China to
unify her currency and at a later stage to convert it to
a Gold Standard. The relations, geographical and commer-
cial, of the Colony and the main land of China are so in-
timate that any divorce between their monetary systems
such as would be involved, for instance, in the adoption
by China of a Gold Standard, while Hongkong remained on a
Silver basis could scarcely fail to prejudice the position
of Hongkong as the distributing centre for the trade of
South China. llor do I think the difficulty would be got
over by Hongkong adopting a Gold Standard for a British
Dollar at the rate fixed for the Chinese Standard Dollar.
It is difficult to see how it would be possible to maintain
a Gold parity between the Chinese and British coins, even
of the same weight and fineness in silver, in view of the
comparative