TRADE OF ALL KINDS. "Fair weight, fair measure, fair speech." B. Franklin. It cannot be denied that if the English are a nation of shopkeepers, and have never proved the truth of Napoleon's charge more fully than during the last years, the Americans are not unmindful of the same source of wealth, and shop-slang, as their British cousins call the terminology of the counting-house, forms no insignificant part of our peculiar speech. Much, however, is here also looked upon as American, that has long been in use as good or bad-English, and among these terms, wrongfully imputed to us, stands naturally foremost the Almighty Dollar. How often have English authors cast the unlucky word, first coined in its modern form by W. Irving in 1837, in his Creole Village, into our teeth, and tried to make the world believe that none but Americans knew the "almighty" power of money! We hope they will recall the first lines of Ben Jonson's Epistle to the Countess of Holland, which read thus: "Whilst that for which all virtue now is sold, and substituting the dollar for the guinea, they may safely claim the authorship of the phrase. It may even be doubted whether the dollar is as powerful in America as gold is in England, although a sarcastic writer speaks severely of the "unrelenting and desperate onwardness of the great Yankee dollar-chase.” (Putnam's Magazine, April, 1855.) It is certainly remarkable that, with all this veneration for the Dollar, the sign by which it is represented in writing ($) should still be an unexplained mystery. The most plausible explanation among the many that have been offered, is, that it represents the letters U. S. (United States) drawn in one, for brevity's sake, so as to distinguish the American currency from the Spanish coins, which were largely used before the young republic could establish its own coinage. It is equally unjust to charge Americans with the invention of the phrase, to make money, much as they may be addicted to the practice. Dr. Johnson already rebuked Boswell sharply for using it, and said: "Don't you see the impropriety of it? To make money is to coin it; you should say, to get money." Moreover, if Americans are fond of making money, they are also able to make a good use of their earnings, as England has seen in the benefactions of Mr. Peabody. They may well be pardoned, therefore, the almost endless variety of terms they employ in designating large sums, speaking of a mint, an ocean, a mine, a sight, and a power of money. Money itself has in the United States, as in England, probably more designations than any other object-liquor alone exceptedmany of which are purely whimsical, while others may be traced back to the material of which coins are made. Among the less generally known terms are John Davis or the Ready John, sometimes simply John or Ready, spondulics, dooteroomus, often shortened into doot; tow, wad (both of them evidently tailors' slang); hardstuff or hard, dirt, shinplasters, or simply plasters; wherewith, shadscales, or scales, "for short;" dyestuffs, charms, and also the more modern designation of stamps; all of which are missing in the list given in the English Slang Dictionary, and may therefore be considered as Americanisms. Unfortunately, the skill in making money is sometimes illegally employed after the manner of Dr. Johnson's suggestion. False coins, the makers of which are curiously called coniackers, abounded as long as specie was in use, and since greenbacks are the only currency, counterfeit paper-money is quite as plentiful. The great success of one of the earlier counterfeiters has made his name a byword, as that of the great resurrectionist in England has become familiar to all readers. Burke abroad has his counterpart in Bogus at home. The latter is, however, a vile corruption of a most noble and romantic name, the Italian Borghese. In the year 1837 there passed through the Western and Southwestern |