ocally 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.

The third reason is that France has very large investments and credit
resources outside, and can still summon money from abroad.

You see more English than French soldiers in the life of Paris. Their
khaki uniforms are as conspicuous there as in London.

The character of the early enlistments for the front in London is
illustrated by the following story. An officer entered a restaurant
where a group of English soldiers in khaki uniforms were enjoying their
cigarettes and pipes. The officer threw some shillings on the table
and called, "Waiter, give these men some beer."

And a khaki uniform snapped forth a sovereign on the same table, and
cried, "Waiter, give this officer some champagne."

Bank statements are queer contraptions nowadays. While the United
States, with less gold in the country and less reserve in the banks
than formerly, is showing the most enormous surplus--and a legitimate
and better-protected surplus by reason of the new bank act--and the
Bank of England is counting $100,000,000 of gold in Canada as a London
bank reserve, and Russia has counted, as gold in her reserve, money on
deposit which has been loaned out on time; while Belgium is doing a
banking busines