62 JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS 



are forged, probably neither the minister of finance nor the national 

 bank, nor the police, have the remotest idea. 



Our French neighbors, like the Belgians, will tolerate a twenty 

 franc note, but there in the descendent scale they inflexibly draw the 

 line. Just after the Franco-German war of 1870-1, there was, for a 

 short time, a terrible scarcity of hard cash. What ready money there 

 was had been hidden or buried by the frightened possessors thereof. 

 The Bank of France, in stress of gold and silver, was fain reluctantly 

 and tentatively to issue five franc notes. After a very little while the 

 public would have none of them. They feared a yet further descent 

 in denomination. They dreaded franc, half-franc, twenty-five cen- 

 times notes. They shuddered at the gory spectre which seemed to 

 be hovering over them — the phantom of the assignats ; the awful 

 " shin-plasters " of the Revolution, which were never redeemed, and 

 the depreciation of which was aggravated by the cynical policy of 

 Mr. Pitt, who, in order to hasten the bankruptcy of the Republic, 

 caused assignats by the hundred weight, forged in England, to be 

 smuggled into France. The Roman Emperor said that money had 

 no odour. As a matter of fact, in sadly numerous instances it has 

 had the smell of blood. The French assignat reeks with sanguinary 

 memories ; and little less ghastly is the history of the English one 

 pound note. 



There is extant a rare pamphlet, published in 18 19, being a 

 report of a Committee of the Society ot Arts, relative to the mode of 

 preventing the forgery of bank notes, and the publication of this 

 curious document is justified by the remark that since 181 5 the con^ 

 victions before the Criminal Courts for bank note forgery had 

 increased in an alarming ratio, while juries became more and more 

 reluctant to visit with the extreme penalty of the law, a crime for the 

 prevention of which no successful precautions had been taken. 

 Added to this was the notorious fact that at many recent trials it had 

 been shown that forged notes had passed, undetected, under the 

 scrutiny of the Bank inspectors. Appended to the report are several 

 models of one pound notes proposed to be issued, and so artistically 

 and elaborately engraved, as, in the opinion of the Committee, to 

 defy the skill of the most expert forger. Among these perhaps the 

 most singular is a one pound note produced exclusively by means of 

 typography and wood engraving, which it was claimed could never 

 be imitated, inasmuch as to execute it there would be required the 



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