Arizona republican., 1908-07-06

 tion of commercials.
 , While paper money is still counter feited, gold and silver coins receive more attention. The great difficulty in the field of the money maker is found in the necessity of conforming at the same time to the standards, , weight, appearance and ring. While a
 counterfeit coin may have the correct
 weight, the ring as a general thing is
 often so poor as to cause immediate
 exposure Then too it usually is not I so trim in appearance as the genuine,
 and the coin often has the well-known
 greasy feeling of base metal.
 daring and temporarily success full counterfeiting scheme was dis covered recently in France, where thousands of counterfeit gold ten franc pieces were put in circula- tion. They were made of glass, which, in a molten state, was forced into moulds. Then by another lequally ingenious process known technically as that of "galvano- -plas- trie" the coins were covered with a fine film of gold. So perfect was their appearance and so joyous their ring when tested on a marble slab that no one thought of suspecting them. There was one weakness, however,-there- always is-and that was their fragibility. The cashier of bank dropping one on the stone floor in his hurry was supplied to see it shiver into thousand pieces, and the murder was out Next day nearly every merchant in the city Iwhere most of these coins had been put in circulation was busily engag ed, with many maledictions, in test ing all his gold coins with a ham Inner.
 Methods in this country would hardly seem to be so artistic. One of the commonest Is plating five-cent pieces with gold and passing them off on the newly landed foreigners as fivedollar gold pieces. The sil- yer coins are perhaps most coun- forfeited, for while the secret ser vice raked in s6,00O as spurious gold coin last year, the haul in silver currency was double that amount. Sometimes a counterfeit of the sub- sidiary coins is stamped out of cop per or brass and plated, but they are easy of detection as are those made from pewter.
 An extremely good test for coun- terfeit eoin is to cut sharply with the mifled edge of good coin against the suspected one. If it be bad the metal will almost immedi- ately begin to shave off. It is a test with which the public might be- come acquainted to its profit, for it can be tried anywhere in a moment | tAaN l. ...-r two coins to rub one against the other.
 There are many ways of doctor ing good coins7 to the gain of the criminal and the public loss. over in China for instance the willy ori- ental thinks it worth while to cut Uncle Sam's silver dollars into two flat halves, for the purpose of scoop ing bullion from the inside They are then filled up with metal of Ia proper weight and fastened to- gether so carefully as practically to defy detection. In this country similar but even more delicate treat ment is given to gold coins, as silver is considered unworthy of notice by the artistic worker in this line Plugging" is thet favorite method employed and the larger denomi- nations of gold coins, especially twenty dollar gold pieces, are se- lected. The interior of these coins is bored out with exceedingly deli cate instruments, several dollars worth of pure gold being obtained from each. The minute hole is drilled in the edges. and so ex- pertly is it done, and so neatly and skillfully is the interior plugged with bad but weighty metal, that these coins often defy detection until they reach the hands of an expert. The puncture is so small and so cIev- erly annealed with pure gold that very good pair of eyes is necessary to detect it.
 From such work as this the meth ods of converting good money into | bad pass through an increasingly unartistic series of efforts. Some counterfeiters give the gold coins an acid bath, or sweat" them out of a dollar or two of the good metal and then pass them along The coins are genuine, of course, but the sweating deprives them of the re- quired weight. These sweated coins pass in circulation from hand to hand until they reach the banks or the subtreasuries, where they are at once caught up by the coin count CTS, and their careers come to sudden and abrupt close as coins of the realm.
 The wonder is not that there is counterfeit coin in circulation, but rather that the amount is constantly decreasing and that through the eff forts of the secret service it is fast approaching the point where it will be negligible quantity. And it is rather grim commentary on Amer ican ability that the great majority of counterfeiters in this country are native born. The foreigner is little able to compete in this line appar- ently, for out of all the persons ar rested by the secret service last year for counterfeiting, nearly seventy-five per cent were Americans Italians and Russians came next, but far in | the rear.
 | NO LAUGHING ALLOWED THERE. l Neither mon nor Unn1ap ra oIInual