The following article concerning the forging of postage stamps was originally published in Stamp Collectors’ Fortnightly (November 1921) and written by Fred J. Melville.

The Inadequate Decision of the Madrid Convention of the Postal Union
Philately and philatelists can render, and have rendered, valuable services to the community. On many occasions it has been proved that the philatelist’s knowledge of stamps is more intimate and peculiar than that of Government experts and officials. A notable instance of philatelic service in the detection of a forgery of a stamp on an extensive scale to defraud a great nation out of a portion of its legitimate revenues is recorded in this number of the Stamp Collectors’ Fortnightly (see “Philately: the Watchdog of Nations”), and within a few hours of our writing on the Argentine sensation, we have received the belated official record of the Universal Postal Union Convention of Madrid. It is almost exactly a year since the Convention and the Final Protocol were signed by the delegates of all the nations in the Union at Madrid on November 30th, 1920, but except for a few details, the results of the discussions at Madrid are all but unknown.

To our intense disappointment the representatives of the postal administrations of the world have failed to appretiate their best safeguards in the matter of counterfeit postage stamps. Article 20 of the Convention gives the outcome of their deliberations on this subject, which we quote in full:

ARTICLE 20.
Counterfeit Impressions and Postage Stamps.
The high contracting parties undertake to adopt or to propose to their respective legislatures, the necessary measures for punishing the fraudulent use, for the prepayment of correspondence, of counterfeit postage stamps or stamps already used, as well as of counterfeit impressions of stamping machines or of impressions already used. They also undertake to adopt or to propose to their respective legislatures, the necessary measures for prohibiting and repressing the fraudulent manufacture, sale, hawking, or distribution of impressed and adhesive stamps in use in the postal service, forged or imitated in such a manner that they could be mistaken for the impressed and adhesive stamps issued by the administration of any one of the contracting parties.

The representatives of the high contracting parties may consider that they are only concerned with stamps presently used in the post, and their decision to adopt or propose such measures for punishing contraventions are simply carrying on the decisions arrived at so long ago as the Vienna Convention of 1891.

The time, however, was ripe, we consider, for carrying the matter further. Forgeries of stamps used in the post are in many cases no doubt the outcome of some successes achieved with forgeries of stamps for sale to collectors. The forger, and with him we must associate the facsimile-monger, on the Continent works with a full sense of immunity from punishment so long as he confines his attentions to obsolete’ stamps of countries other than that in which he is domiciled. It would be much the same in this country, but, happily, we are fairly, if not quite, free from the spurious stamp factories which are the philatelic plague spots of certain cities and towns in France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. Our laws, however, have proved altogether inadequate when brought to bear upon the forgery of obsolete stamps issued by any other Government than our own or of one of the British possessions.

Our contention is that to ensure the efficacy of the provisions against the spurious imitation of current stamps of all the countries in the Union, the terms of Article 20 of the Madrid Convention should have been carried a point – a big point – further, and made to cover all Government postage stamps which have now, or shall have hereafter, or have had in the past, a value or use in the prepayment or franking of correspondence. Our reason can be put succinctly for the philatelist in the argument that:

The man who can produce safely, and efficiently, the extremely good forgeries or facsimiles of the Swedish “tretio” errors of 1872-76 in Italy or Switzerland, is equally well equipped and equally capable of producing forgeries or facsimiles of current stamps of Sweden and of scores of other countries. His immunity from punishment for the former leaves him a standing menace in respect of the latter, and he has even better means for putting current stamps into circulation to his profit.

At the present moment there are in Germany numbers of factories working openly in the production of almost exact colour reproductions of recent and non-demonetised stamps for use ostensibly as advertising stamps or as the Americans call them, “stickers.”

It is not, perhaps, within the province of the meditations of the high-contracting parties to a Postal Union convention to consider the protection of philatelists, even though they may have occasion from time to time for recognising the services of philatelists in the detection of contraventions of the postal laws. But in seeking to protect their revenues they would do well to go further in their own interests, for it is only by going to the root of all forgery of stamps that their own immunity from this evil can be secured. It is not sufficient that some of the forgers should be scotched. “The lamp of the wicked shall be put out,” saith the Scriptures, not “some of them.”