"We Mean Business"

When for the second time President Roosevelt ordered gold out of hoarding and into the Treasury last August, there rose to plague him this legal question: should the order, under the Emergency Banking Act, have been signed by the Secretary of the Treasury? Last week Acting Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau cleaned up the legal debris by issuing a new order calling in gold. More drastic than the President's, it carried no exemption for holders of $100 or less; fixed an additional penalty for evasion at twice the amount of gold held. "There is several million around in the banks and we are going after it." declared Mr. Morgenthau. "We mean business."* But more important than extracting gold from private pockets last week was the question of recovering $3,600,000,000 in gold now owned by the Federal Reserve Banks. So complex were the legal and political aspects of the question that President Roosevelt was seriously thinking of leaving it to Congress. Few of his monetary advisers doubted, however, that the gold would eventually be called in, so that if and when the dollar is devaluated 50% the Treasury could pocket 100% profit on the $3,600,000,000.

*So often during the summer and autumn did Attorney General Cummings vehemently declare that he, too, ''meant business" on ending gold hoarding that his threats became a standing joke at the Department of Justice.

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