If the depreciation of the silver subsidiary coinage was the only evil arising out of the establishment of provincial mints the situation need not have caused anxiety. But the currency situation has been considerably aggravated by enormous issues of ten-cash copper pieces from the provincial mints. In the latter part of the last decade of the nineteenth century the difficulty was to maintain the value of silver coins. The several provincial mints issued also the ten-cash or one cent piece; this coin was very popular, for it had an exchange value greater than a hundredth part of a dollar - on account of the depreciation of small silver. Although the cash was never intended to be a token coin and in the past the coinage of cash was on the basis of weight for value, the rise in the price of copper and the greed of officialdom in China led to very large reduction of the actual amount of metal in this coin, as also its multiples. The mint took advantage of the situation and issued the copper cent, inscribed at the mints as worth one hundredth of a dollar or ten cash; but these coins, when considered in relation to the dollar or to the cash, were actually only token coins, worth intrinsicly less than half their nominal value. The value of the cash has fluctuated enormously from as low as seven hundred to the dollar to as high as one thousand five hundred. About the time of the establishment of mints for silver coinage, copper cash was being minted in almost all important towns in China. With the gradual increase of the number of new mints, and issues of ten-cash or one-cent pieces, the coinage of cash by crude methods was being gradually given up. Owing to the depreciation of the silver currency on account of the large issue of ten- and twenty-cent pieces the new mints began to devote great attention to the coinage of the copper one-cent pieces. For some years, the profits were so huge that the mints in some places almost exclusively devoted their time to the issue of copper coins. It is a rather remarkable trait in Chinese character that when any new plan is adopted they generally overdo things. The result in this case was that the mints began to flood the country with the copper one-cent pieces; and before the Revolution in 1911, values had so depreciated that a dollar was worth as much as 150 one-cent pieces.