Nor was the chaotic state of the currency the only evil connected with its use. The cash, while having the preference over the nickel coins because its intrinsic value was more nearly equal to its market value, and it was therefore more stable, was intolerably inconvenient for monetary transactions of any considerable size. Its value was so low as to make it not worth the risk of counterfeiting. But even the traveller for a few weeks in the country could pay his expenses only by taking along several mule-loads of these petty coins. The nickels, on the contrary, were exceedingly unstable, and were subject to wholesale debasement and counterfeiting. It is true, as Mr. Hulbert charges, that “counterfeit nickels were made largely by the Japanese in Osaka”; but it is also true that these coins were counterfeited in large quantities by the Chinese, and that the worst offenders were the Koreans themselves. Here, as everywhere during the contemporaneous history of Korean affairs, it was the “Korean Executive” which was chiefly to blame. In some cases the Government loaned its coining machine for a money consideration; in others, the “promoter of the minting industry” was obliged to content himself with a manufacturing outfit obtained on private account. In this connection the author calls to mind an astonishing but authentic story of how a boy, deputed by his father to return to a benevolent association in Seoul a sum of money which had been originally stolen by the trusted agent of this association and loaned to the father, stole the money again and spent it in the purchase of a counterfeiting machine. It should be added that these remarkable transactions were of recent occurrence. Japanese counterfeiters were arrested, tried and punished, after the passage of a law by the Diet making it an offence to counterfeit foreign money in Japan, with the same penalties as those applied to cases of counterfeiting Japanese money.[68] Even before that, administrative measures were taken by the Japanese to break up the illicit industry. So far as Korean offenders were concerned, nothing was done to punish the chief culprits. In fact, the Korean Government was hardly in a position to do anything, having itself made large over-issues of nickels, and even surreptitiously farmed out the right to private individuals to coin them. This right was exercised, among others, by a relative of the Emperor. Doubtless this official malfeasance is what Mr. Hulbert alludes to when he speaks of the “prime movers in the deterioration of the currency.”