THE FRANCO-GERMAN INDEMNITY OF 1871 277 
explanation certainly is easy as regards the heaviest and most 
conspicuous remittances of that time, those from the United 
States. The subsidies of the Seven Years’ War and those of the 
Napoleonic period are by no means simple; nor is the Franco- 
German indemnity as regards the German side of that episode. 
My hypothesis is suggested chiefly by the Franco-German in- 
demnity. The French side of this, as has been said, is easy to 
understand; it is the German experiences which suggest a 
clue. 
That clue is in the gradual character of the process of liquidation. 
The absorption of the indemnity proceeds into the German 
economic body appears to have been spread over the greater part 
of the ensuing decade. If only time be given, great operations of 
this kind can be wound up without disastrous disturbance, nay, with 
hardly a consciousness of strain. In Professor Silberling’s paper on 
the Napoleonic period there is an intimation of what may then have 
happened. The first of the English Rothschilds, we are told, was 
of inestimable service to the British Treasury in the business of 
sending funds abroad. While not a little, it seems, went in the 
form of specie, the greater part was remitted thru bills. The bills, 
one may guess, were drawn on Continental “merchants,” who 
were indicated to the Treasury by Rothschild and were encouraged 
by him to meet the bills when presented. These obliging persons 
probably nursed them; were willing to hold or renew until settle- 
ment could finally be made, and enlisted others to aid them when 
their own means approached exhaustion. No doubt eventually 
they found the operations profitable, notwithstanding all the risks 
and delays entailed by the long years of warfare. And eventually 
the settlement from England was doubtless effected thru the export 
of goods. From time to time, as Continental bills came on the 
London market, based on the sale of goods, the Treasury bought 
them and used them for meeting their outstanding obligations to 
their drawees on the Continent. It is quite possible that the last 
settlements may have been postponed to the period of peace after 
1815, when English goods flowed out in the great volume so often 
referred to in the literature of the time.