132 CURRENCY. 



well, and perhaps more safely and profitably to themselves, 

 as well as more advantageously to the public. There were 

 not wanting examples, and most successful examples, of such 

 undertakings. The Bank of Venice had been in existence 

 for five centuries by the year in which Charles stole the 

 goldsmiths' money. The Bank of Genoa had been a flourish- 

 ing corporation for nearly three centuries. Banks were found 

 in many of the free German cities. But the most famous 

 and envied of these institutions was the Bank of Amsterdam. 



The Bank of Amsterdam was founded in the year 1609, 

 in a year when the independence of Holland had been 

 virtually secured, though the first truce with Spain was not 

 finally settled till the following year. Now by this time the 

 commercial prosperity of Holland was at its zenith, and 

 Amsterdam was to the seventeenth century what London 

 has been to the nineteenth. But this trade was carried on 

 in the currencies of all nations, and the Dutch saw, as the 

 Venetians and Genoese had seen before them, how con- 

 venient it would be if they could establish an institution 

 which should receive, sort, and assay these currencies, giving 

 warrants transferable from hand to hand to those who might 

 deposit moneys with them. They would give the merchant 

 an instrument of credit absolutely secured, and so useful that 

 it would bear a premium from the beginning. But in theory, 

 and for a long time in fact, their cash and their paper exactly 

 squared. Their profit seems to have been made from the 

 floating balances of their customers, from the obligation 

 which they put on all merchants of negotiating foreign bills 

 with them when the amount was above a certain sum, 

 from a commission on transfers of accounts, and from the agio 

 on their notes. So enormous were their deposits, that at the 

 end of the seventeenth century their cash balance was said 

 to have been as much as thirty-six millions sterling. 



The possession of such a prodigious treasure, and the repu- 

 tation for unblemished credit strikingly illustrated in 1672, 

 when Louis and Charles conspired together to make sudden 



