Ecu

In the days of moping, pallid Louis IX, "Saint Louis" (1226-70), Frenchmen dealt in a gold coin called the ecu or "crown." Last week M. le Professeur Charles Gide of the College de France proposed that a new ecu be struck with, the value of one U. S. dollar and that the present depreciated franc (4-c-) be scrapped.

Cried he: "The spectacle of the franc at a fifth of its pre-War value is as pitiful a sight as the War-maimed poilus one encounters in the streets! . . . Salvation lies in a new currency, in severing all ties with the past! Already Belgium, Austria, Hungary and Russia have struck new coins/- .... The best reason for reviving the ecu is that it would stop our people from thinking in terms of francs and would abolish forever the present distressing comparison of salaries and prices with those of pre-War days. . . . The franc, even at par (19.3-c-) was a ridiculously small unit which never served any purpose except to complicate bills and infest columns with fractions. ... As for that mathematical microbe the centime ($.0004) it would have been discarded long ago if only someone had been able to reckon up the centuries wasted in counting such a monetary parasite."

/- Respectively the belga, schilling, pen go, and tchervonetz.