This exhortation was hardly necessary, and at the close of Senator Allaben's remarks I arose and presented another view of the case. It happened by a curious coin- cidence that, having made a few years before a very careful study of the issues of paper money during the French Revolution, I had a portion of my very large collection of assignats, mandats, and other revolutionary currency in Albany, having brought it there in order to show it to one or two of my friends who had expressed an interest in the subject. Holding this illustrative material in reserve I showed the whole amount of our American paper currency in circulation to be about eight hundred million dollars, of which only about one half was of the sort to which the senator referred. I then pointed to the fact that, although the purchasing power of the French franc at the time of the Revolution was fully equal to the purchasing power of the American dollar of our own time, the French revolutionary government issued, in a few months, forty- five thousand millions of francs in paper money, and had twenty-five thousand millions of it in circulation at the time when the great depression referred to by Dr. Allaben had taken place. I also pointed out the fact that our American notes were now so thoroughly well engraved that counterfeiting was virtually impossible, so that one of the leading European governments had its notes engraved in New York, on this account, whereas, the French assignats could be easily counterfeited, and, as a matter of fact, were counterfeited in vast numbers, the British government pouring them into France through the agency of the French royalists, especially in Brittany, almost by shiploads, and to such purpose, that the French government officials themselves were at last unable to discriminate between the genuine money and the counterfeit. I also pointed out the connection of our national banking system with our issues of bonds and paper, one of the happiest and most statesmanlike systems ever devised, whereas, in France there was practically no redemption for the notes, save as they could be used for purchasing from the government the doubtful titles to the confiscated houses and lands of the clergy and aristocracy. The speech of Senator Allaben had exercised a real effect, but these simple statements, which I supported by evidence, and especially by exhibiting specimens of the assignats bearing numbers showing that the issues had risen into the thousands of millions, and in a style of engraving most easily counterfeited, sufficed to convince the Senate that no such inference as was drawn by the senator was warranted by the historical facts in the case. A vote was taken, the bill was passed, the troops were finally raised, and the debt was extinguished not many years afterward.