Supplement II - Memorandum on the present state of the currency question in Holland and Java (1879) by N.P. van den Berg

Summary

As a rule people out of Holland have got but very scanty information about the measures taken by the Dutch Government with regard to currency matters in Holland and Java. In the valuable Report from the Select Committee on the Depreciation of Silver, ordered, by the House of Commons, to be printed 5 July, 1867, it is stated (p.XLVI), that “as to Holland the Committee have to regret that they have been left almost without any information; … which is the more to be regretted, as her trade with her Eastern possessions, where there is an exclusive silver currency, renders her position peculiarly interesting, as being in many respects analogous to that of the United Kingdom;” - and it is not therefore to be wondered at that in the copious Appendix of the Handbook on Gold and Silver by an Indian Official, published in 1878 by Longmans, Green & Co., London, readers are told “that nothing has been done with regard to Netherlands India”, while as early as in 1873 the coinage of silver money on behalf of the Dutch East Indies was stopped, and gold had been made the regulator of the Indian currency in the first semester of 1877.

Consequently the following memoranda may be of some use to the student of the monetary question, to whom the official documents published in Holland are not available.

Seven years ago, in October 1872, the Dutch Government, fully aware of the difficulties with which Holland might have to contend by reason of the monetary reform in Germany, appointed a special commission to consider the subject and to advise about the measures to be taken with regard to the interests of the country.

In a most valuable report, dated December 28,1872, - a document of great interest for the study of the monetary question in Europe, - the commissioners pointed out that it would be impossible for Holland to retain the silver standard, established by the Act dated November 26,1847, were all its neighbours to adopt gold as their standard of value.