its ~tal eld tes ay. ved il old ry, ac- tes Af" ‘he iet ce- 115 ia, Se he al of ap O- id he 1 0 ae Russian Soviet’s bank, has certain humorous aspects. If the con- signment had been goods instead of gold no question would have arisen ; at any rate, none did arise regarding the item of $30,596,000, officially reported as “merchandise imported from Soviet Russia in Europe in the six months ending with December 1927”. Apparently neither the State Department nor the Treasury saw any reason for not approving the gold importation also; but the Department of Justice ruled that the Government could countenance it only if the title to the gold was guaranteed. The Government could not forbid banks to take Russian gold from an incoming steamship or demand that it be sent back to Russia. But the gold had to be assayed at the Mint before it could be used for bank reserves, and the Treasury could instruct the Mint to refuse its services. “The New York banks professed inability to guarantee the title; perhaps being unable to see how title was to be established. perhaps merely puzzled at the Government's attitude, The official ruling could hardly be ascribed to dislike of * tainted money”; pre- sumably it was based on a suspicion that the gold was part of the Imperial Russian Bank’s $600,000,000 reserve, which in 1917 had been seized by the Bolshevist insurgents, along with other property of the old regime. This theory is now strengthened by the action of the Bank of France in claiming the gold as its rightful property. However, Siberia is now turning out upward of $20,000,000 new gold annually from which the present Russian State Bank's reserve of about $90,000,000 gold, comparing with five million dollars five years ago, was mostly accumulated. So it may not be easy to prove from which source this particular $5,200,000 came. We often hear nowadays of ‘earmarked gold,’ but that refers to its destination, hot its origin. Besides, if the Soviet’s title to the gold in the Im- perial Bank’s reserve is defective, how about its title to the Ural rold mines? “The incident has the curious interest that attached to almost every transfer of gold throughout the war; it has much of the war- time atmosphere about it. ‘Gold movement,’ which before July 1914, had been the most routine and commonplace of international transactions, suddenly began to present unexpected pictures. The treasure ships that brought a billion dollars’ worth of European gold to America in 1915 and 1916, and the railway train that in 1914 carried the $800,000,000 coin reserve of the Bank of France to Bordeaux, with voN KLUck at the gates of Paris, were the least surprising of them. We somehow began to get new ideas of gold