Some people pleaded with them that this money would be used against France, and that every franc would go to repay the German loans; and they were right.
In this financial situation France was suddenly plunged into war, and while Germany and England have been raising money by the billion, the marvelous thing is that France has made no public issue beyond one-year notes, but continues to pay her bills in gold and has the exchanges all in her favor. Money is flowing in, and not out.
It was most marvelous to find in France, in the fifth month of the war, prompt payment, no distrust of the government paper issues, gold and paper circulating side by side, and no strain for gold as in Germany.
Nevertheless, the war has been fought thus far for the most part on the paper issues of the Bank of France and with the gold reserve of that bank undiminished.
The first reason I can assign for it is that the French soldier gets twenty-five centimes, or five cents a day, or one fifth the pay of an English soldier. Kitchener's army is to-day costing far more than the entire French army. French food is locally abundant and cheap, notwithstanding the _octroi_, or French local tax of one eighth. The main need of the French from the outside is boots and horses. The English in France are not taxing French resources at all. All their food-supplies, including the hay for their horses, come from England.
The English troops are also well supplied with money from home. Outside the regular Tommy Atkins, the volunteers and territorials coming into France have abundant money. They are the men from the cities and from the wealthiest families in the country life of England. There are more than 300,000 of them on French soil, and as they come and go in France, they are spending not less than four shillings a day each, or nearly four times their wages. This makes a daily expenditure of 60,000 pounds sterling in France, and calling for exchange. Hence the English pound has been at the lowest price in France on record, 24.95 and sometimes 24.90.
There is also the additional reason of higher insurance rates for the transportation of money across the Channel,--a channel infested with mines and submarines. It is no uncommon thing for boats crossing the Channel to sight floating mines, and the wonder is that disasters therefrom have been so few.