明治六年七分利付外債の募集過程 : 構想の提起・内定と米国での起債状況

抄録

The purpose of this paper is to show how the "Rokken" (pension bond) policy dependent upon the foreign loan was proposed and decided informally to be introduced, and how the loan was designed to be floated in America, to abolish the hereditary stipend, which has not yet been fully considered. The conclusions of this study are as follows. 1. The design of abolishing the hereditary stipend by the "Rokken" policy had already become a dominant opinion among the officials of the Ministry of Finance before "Haihan-Chiken" (the abolition of feudal clans and the establishment of prefectures). After that the necessity grew pressing to put the "Rokken" policy into practice for the completion of "Hai-han-Chiken", but the "Rokken" policy could not be easily carried out right away because of the 'dispute' over what was to be done first concerning "Shizoku" (pre-Samurai). But the situation was changed then the Iwakura mission was planned. In other words, the "Rokken" policy wasto be put into practice as one of the most important policies when it was finally decided for T. Okubo to join the mission mainly by getting Inoue's approval of it through the realization of one of his requests, viz. T. Saigo's promise to co-operate with such officials as K. Inoue, S. Okuma for the completion of "Haihan-Chiken". 2. Inoue and Okuma tried to avoid the deliberation of "Sain" (左院, a kind of legislative organization) and preferred to that of "Uin" (右院, an annual meeting of ministers) so as to get the approval of the "Rokken" policy by "Seiin "(正院, a kernel of government), and offered Saigo the replenishment of police by Kagoshima-Shizoku to maintain his support. Without this offer in addition to his promise, Saigo would not have approved such a severe policy, which is cleared by the newly discovered materials. 3. At first Inoue and K. Yoshida planned to float a new external loan in America to avoid the bad influence by the former external loan the documents of which were prepared by H. N. Lay and treated as notarial deed in spite of its being fraudulent. At the same time they had a strong criticism against the former loan because it had very inferior conditions. 4. After all Yoshida made up his mind to visit Europe to float a new loan because in these days America had not the adequate market for the capital-export in the form of foreign loan and was confronted with the stringency of money. He did so before the publication of A. Mori's objection, according to the proposal of Shiff in Frankfurt introduced by DeLong.