Trade certainly suffered much in the beginning from the incongruous state of the currency, which was greatly more complicated than we have attempted to outline. Even after the year of probation foreign coins were neither received by traders at their value nor exchangeable in accordance with the treaties. Whether the Government was at the bottom of the obstruction or was overruled by circumstances beyond its control was uncertain, but the British consul-general made masterful exertions to set the matter right. Currency reform, however, has baffled so many generations of expert economists that, even assuming the goodwill of the native Government, an alien official new to the country must have found it difficult to accomplish much, with the time and means at his disposal. Earl Russell in 1862 "declined to pronounce on so large and intricate a question," and would not even discuss it with the Japanese envoys. Japanese currency formed the subject of four elaborate reports by the Secretary to her Majesty's Treasury, extending over twelve months, from December 1862 to December 1863, drawn up after personal conference with Sir Rutherford Alcock and on information derived from various other sources, especially from a series of very able papers by Consul Winchester. In each of these reports Mr Arbuthnot remarks on the paucity of data, and in each he qualifies the deductions of the preceding one. Had the series been still further extended, it is even doubtful if finality of judgment would have been reached; for in his third report he says, "The whole question, both as regards the condition of the currency and the real intentions of the Japanese Government, is involved in so much obscurity that no sound judgment can yet be formed on the subject" (May 1863). It would be a mere weariness to the reader to attempt to elucidate a problem which an expert student found perplexing, but a few salient points brought out in Mr Arbuthnot's review may repay citation, as illustrative of the general state of relations beyond the immediate question of the currency. "We found," he says, "the Japanese with a carefully devised system of coinage, presenting indeed anomalies, when regarded from a European point of view, but apparently well adapted to their domestic wants; and their coins were found on assay in London to be well manufactured." The Chinese had no such system, and the evolution of a metallic currency entitled to such high praise, in a country from which the rest of the world had been long shut off, is one of the most striking evidences of the high originating faculty of the Japanese.