"Not worth a Continental" is an expression which brings us to the next chapter in American experience of inconvertible paper currencies. The so-called Continental money was the means by which the Continental Congress and the individual colonies--too timid to tax--endeavored to finance the Revolutionary War. By 1781, a paper dollar was worth less than two cents in specie, and soon afterward it became practically worthless.[7] Robbery was legalized; rogues flourished; and their frauds were encouraged and protected by a government whose policy enabled debtors to pay their debts in valueless money. We hear of creditors running away from their debtors and being paid off "without mercy." Stories were told of creditors in Rhode Island leaping out of back windows to escape the attentions of their debtors.[8] In short, the law became an engine of oppression and destroyed the fortunes of thousands who had put their confidence in it. In the words of Breck, a friendly critic, "... the old debts were paid when the paper money was more than seventy to one ... widows, orphans and others were paid for money lent in specie with depreciated paper." [7] Bullock, _Monetary History of the United States_, chap. V. [8] _Ibid._, chap. V. In 1780 Congress actually adopted a plan to redeem its paper issues at one fortieth of their pretended or nominal value. The astonishing thing is that all this knavery was devised, or winked at, not only by low class politicians but by statesmen of renown. The maxim _salus populi suprema lex_ was relied upon not for the first or last time as a sufficient excuse for a crime far more pernicious than that of a private forger. But we have not yet realized, in our minds or in our penal codes, that public vices ought to be punished at least as vigorously as private crimes. That, even as a desperate last resort for financing war, a flood of paper money defeats its own object was conclusively proved a few years later during the French Revolution. The French assignats "have taken their place in history as the classical example of paper money made worthless by over-issue. After their final collapse in 1796, French finance reverted perforce to a metallic basis." So Mr. Hawtrey, a British Treasury official, who has given us recently a lucid and sufficiently detailed account of this extraordinary incident--extraordinary but no longer singular, for the same course with the same results has been pursued during and since the war of 1914-1918 by Russia and Poland, and in a greater or less degree by most of the European belligerents.