Most Austrians did not really care much about such things. After all, the royal family's extravagance had gone on for centuries, and the occasional chance to share in the spoils did not seem like a bad thing either.
As long as life remained bearable and the money being levied belonged to the lords, they could not be bothered to think about it.
Still, someone would occasionally put forth such arguments. The Austrian Empire's intelligence agencies were everywhere; tracing the source of such rhetoric and precisely striking at the people behind it was easy enough.
As night fell, the clamor gradually subsided. Some returned laden with the joy of victory, some came back empty-handed and full of regret, while others had happened to hit a nail and were receiving electroshock treatment in the secret police's offices.
The Austrian Empire's state machine operated with such precision and magic, yet it was not without a trace of human warmth.
Inside a bar, a grain merchant from Lombardy was turning over a newly issued banknote in his hands.
This was the Austrian Empire's newly issued 20-Florin banknote. Its paper was smooth and delicate, printed with intricate patterns and the royal crest. He ran his fingers carefully along the textured edges, said to be one of its anti-counterfeiting features.
But when it came to preventing forgery, the most crucial feature was that inconspicuous security thread.
Early banknote designs had been rather simple, generally relying only on complex patterns, signatures, or watermarks to distinguish genuine notes from counterfeits. Yet before skilled forgery experts, such measures often proved fragile.
Cases of counterfeit banknotes occurred frequently, severely undermining public confidence in the currency.
That was why many countries had been unwilling to use paper currency and unable to promote it on a large scale.
The harder a nation