EXTRAORDINARY TRIAL FOR FORGERY IN FRANCE.

Southland Times, Issue 618, 14 January 1867, Page 3

EXTRAORDINARY TRIAL FOR FORGERY IN FRANCE.

The case of two Poles, charged with utterring in Prance forged notes of the Bank of Russia, resulted, on Saturday, in an acquittal on very extraordinary grounds. Advocate- General Hemar, in stating the case to the jury, said that for upwards of ten years there had existed offices in Brussels and London, where Russian notes were forged ; and the numerous Polish agents under whose directions the forgeries were committed, had issued hundreds of millions of the false notes in various parts of Europe. He need not enlarge upon the danger of | such fradulent utterings to the trade of civilised nations, and it must be clear to every honest conscience that political | passions were no excuse for forgery. English juries had frequently convicted in similar cases, so had French juries ; and he trusted the jury he was addressing would be equally firm. The prisoner Dr Lipkau, was one of the most active and dangerous agents in circulating thesg forged notes. Through the other prisoner, Loudinski, he was in constant communication with the forgers in London. Papers had beenfo und at his lodgings showing the precise mode in which the forgeries were committed. Two of the forged notes were found in his room, and it was proved that he had many others elsewhere. A witness named Malischenski deposed that Lipkau had passed a forged note to him. which the money-changers, having been warned, refused to receive. The participation of Loudinski, Lipkau's agent in London, was too evident to be denied. Both public and private interests required that such crimes should be punished. He did not oppose the admission of extenuating circumstances. M. Desmanest (the late hatonnier), who defended Dr Lipkau, insisted that a distinction was to be made between those vile criminals who had hitherto been justly convicted of having forged Eussian notes from sordid motives, and Polish emigrants who had ventured upon this vast enterprise with the revolutionary, but entirely disinterested, object of damaging Russian finances by discrediting Eussian bank notes. His client, Dr Lipkau, who was one of the most enthusiastic of Polish patriots, belonged to this category. The notes which he caused to be forged in London he sent- to Russia for distribution, and he never caused the least prejudice to Erench credit. M. Desmarest represented his client as an honest man, universally respected by all who knew him, and as laboriously as successfully practising the medical profession for a livelihood, his patients including very many of the poorest, as well as the richest, of the Polish exiles. An eloquent picture of the interior of Dr Lipkau's house, his children and his young wife, with hair prematurely grey from sorrow, concluded M. Desmarest's speech. M. Hendle, counsel for Loudinski, took the same line of argument. It had always been held that great political and social struggles might, in particular cases, be urged as reasons why the ordinary rules of law and morality should not be applied. M. Thiers, in hisf fourteenth volume of the " History of the Consulate and the Empire," recorded the fact that Napoleon 1., when he invaded Russia, circulated in the country false paper roubles fabricated in Paris. The jury would not, he was persuaded, give the Russian Government the satisfaction of seeing patriotic Poles punished in Paris for doing their utmost, no matter by what means, to counteract the spoliation and massacres of Warsaw. M. Hendle read a certificate from the " Polish National Government," giving his client a very high character. The jury adopted the arguments of the prisoners' counsel, and pronounced a verdict of acquittal. — Weekly Dispatch, Oct. 7.

Great Eastern Photographs. — The Temple Bar says : — Half a dozen rather prim gentlemen, some of whom are fumbling at a particularly commonplace rope — a conventional simper on their faces, a rigid angularity in their figures, and a pervading air of " penny plain and twopence colored " over all. Such are the Great Eastern photographs now proffered in our shop windows. "That manly hand executed what this keen brain devised," and we have here a pocket edition of British worthies. Love's Sacrifice. — A story is told of a Prussian officer of cuirrassiers who previously to attending a parade before the King went to visit his lady-love. During the interview his helmet fell from a table, rolled into the grate, and the horsehair plume was frizzled off. To join his regiment, or pas the King, wearing a singed helmet and one guiltless of horse-tail was utterly impossible, and still leas was it possible to absent himself on such a day, every shop in the city of Berlin was closed. Suddeuly Romeo's fair Juliet startedj seized a pair of scissors, and in a few seconds cut off the whole of her magnificent chevelure daree, and with marvellous ingenuity fastened it to the scorched helmet ; and so the warrior rode past his King. On the 12th of September two men were carried over the Niagara Falls. They attempted to cross the river above the rapids in a small boat, but being struck by a squall were forced into the rapida and carried over. No traces of them or their boat .have been discovered in the river below.