THE LIVELY BANK NOTE. Still very Germ-laden.

Free Lance, Volume VI, Issue 308, 26 May 1906, Page 6

THE LIVELY BANK NOTE. Still very Germ -laden.

THE other day a man suffering" badl^- from facial cancer, and. exaling a sickeningodour, walked up to the teller of a> Wellington bank, and handed him a roll of notes for deposit. They were average notes — filthy, loathsome things — valued at a pound a. time, and fit only for the destructor. The bank teller wants to be a man with a strong stomach, and theaverage handier of an average pound-note should not be a susceptible subject to disease. • • • Conceive the adventures of a-pound-note before it is relegated todestruction. It may have been held between the teeth of racecourse spielers, who may be consumptive, it may be jammed in filthy pockets along with tobacco and a dirty pipe and a much-used handkerchief, and it may be planked down on a sloppy bar-counter and put in a cash register with many others equally adventurous, equally insanitary, and equally dangerous to health. • • • You cannot gauge the number of consumptives made by filthy banknotes, nor can you swear that the greasy paper money is a good friend to specialists in other diseases. And yet the probabilities are that the noisome note is responsible for much illness. A note isn't money — it is only a promise to pay money. Why not, therefore, demand gold from banks? What objection can there be to having a periodical "burn" of the disease disseminators every month or so? • • • We don't suppose for a moment that a healthy person is in the slightest danger from bank-notes. He might stuff the notes previously held in a cancerous man's mouth into his own, and be none the worse. Still, apparently, theire are large numbers of people who are susceptible to every germ that grows, and about the best -germgarden we know of is the poundnote. • • • Until someone invents a note that can be steeped in formalin without injuring the document, the documents ought to be burnt to death with fire whenever disreputable specimens get back to the banks that issue them. If the banks won't do something in the poundnote purifying line, the matter is distinctly one for legislation, or the interference of the health aur thorities. An insanitary house is sometimes destroyed by the orders of the State physicians. Why not slay insanitary bank-notes?