Red Gold

Twenty crimson-dyed wooden kegs of Siberian gold bars (U. S. casks for gold export are white) stood idle four days of last week in the vaults of the Chase National Bank and the Equitable Trust Co., Manhattan, eating up $700 a day interest at the expense of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, which had exported gold to the U. S. for the first time. Standing orders have outlawed Russian gold since 1920. [Only last month Secretary Frank B. Kellogg had ruled against cashing of Russian Soviet railroad bond coupons by the Chase National (TIME, Feb. 13).]

But last week President Coolidge himself ruled that Soviet gold exports to the U. S. were a result of trade between the countries, and should be received. Therefore, Secretary of the Treasury Mellon authorized the Assay office to count, test, weigh the bars, the bankers to sell the bars to the Sub-Treasury for a check in dollar denominations, the Mint to coin the bars into quarter-eagles, half-eagles, eagles, double-eagles. Assay office chemists in the annex to the Sub-Treasury building in Wall Street lit furnaces, uncorked acid bottles, adjusted exquisite balances, burned, corroded, measured, weighed bars of gold. It was standard gold. It was, in fact, new gold--from Siberian mines, which now produce $25,000,000 worth a year. U. S. trade with Russia is now larger than before the war, about $100,000,000 a year. The Soviets look the dollar in the face.