THE HISTORY OF COMMERCE
merely the variable output of the mines, but also the prime importance attached in those eras to the worship of heaven. For the chief demand for copper being in connection with the casting of idols, it resulted that the quantity available for coinage purposes depended largely upon the fervour of the Court's piety, or the need of invoking heaven's aid in some national crisis. Religious zeal thus became responsible for the earliest debasement of the coinage. During the first hundred years of minting operations, the weight of the copper unit varied within comparatively narrow limits in five issues. But the business of erecting temples and peopling them with images of the gods attained such extraordinary dimensions during the whole of the Nara epoch and the opening years of the Heian that the Government, finding the supply of copper inadequate and the treasury exhausted, resorted to the device of debasing the coinage, and the weight of copper in the unit suddenly fell by nearly fifty per cent. Another scheme was to strike special coins to which arbitrary values were given far in excess of their intrinsic values as compared with the unit. The perplexity and confusion resulting from these financial vagaries were, of course, very great. Even apart from such technical irregularities, it must have been exceedingly difficult to conduct tradal transactions with copper coins only. Money-bags were used and boxes; but a hand-cart was the usual means of transporting
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