THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION. 59 



must be brought home in money, which, when our merchants know 

 cannot be carried out again, they will forbear to bring home in 

 money, but let it lie abroad for trade, or keep in foreign banks ; or if 

 our importations exceed our exportations, then to keep credit the 

 merchants will and must find ways of carrying out money by stealth, 

 which is a most easy thing to do, and is everywhere done, and there- 

 fore the law against it signifies nothing. Besides it is seen where 

 money is free there is plenty, where it is restrained, as here (Eng- 

 land), there is great want." 



It is a curious fact that paper should be the only article used to 

 represent commerce, when leather or cloth would seem to be so 

 much more durable. Yet bank note paper lasts a long time, and 

 not unfrequently the Bank of England receives a note of extraordin- 

 ary age. The Bank of Bengal, in India, was once called upon to 

 pay several thousand pounds of notes so old that none of the 

 present generation remembered the pattern. A traveller in France, 

 not many years ago, found a i,ooo franc note pasted on the inside 

 wall of peasant's hut as a pretty picture, which the man said he had 

 picked up years before, and so firmly was it pasted on, that the brick 

 to which the note adhered had to be taken to the bank 

 where it was at once cashed, and is still retained as a curiosity. 

 Leather, according to Socrates, was used in Carthage for coinage at 

 one period, and in 1360, King John of France, having to pay 

 Edward III , of England, 300,000 golden crowns for his ransom, 

 was so impoverished as to be compelled to resort to a coinage of 

 leather for the discharge of his household expenses. Seneca tells us 

 that under Numa Pompilius, both wood and leather took the place 

 of coin, being stamped of a certain value, a fact also put in practice 

 by Frederick II. at the siege of Milan. 



The Bank of England never issues a note a second time. 

 When once it finds its way back to the bank to be exchanged for 

 coin, it is immediately cancelled. The average life of a Bank of 

 England note, or the time in which it is in circulation, is not more 

 than five or six days. The returned notes average about 50,000 a 

 day, and represent, one day with another, about one million pounds 

 in value. Sorted and cancelled, these notes are packed away for 

 five years, at the end of which they are consumed in a furnace, but 

 so perfect is the system under which they are registered and stored, 

 that any particular one, provided the number is asked for, can be 



