small merchant had
dues coming to him in English money he then found them valued at forty
to the pound sterling. This difference between eighty and one hundred
and twenty-five he thought (naturally enough to his unsophisticated
mind) was due to the vacillation in policy of enforcement of the pegged
rate and prosecution of the traffickers.

However opinion may differ as to the blame for the inability to peg the
exchange, we know it was a bonanza to the speculators. Ponzi ought to
have been there to compete with the whiskered money sharks. And we know
there were Americans as well as British, French, Russians and other
nationals who were numbered among those speculators.

After all is said we must admit that the money situation was one that
was exceedingly difficult to handle. It was infinitely worse in
Bolshevikdom. The doughboy who used to find pads of undetached
counterfeit Kerenskie on the dead Bolsheviks, can well believe that
thirty dollars of good American chink one day in the Soviet part of
Russia bought an American newspaper man one million paper roubles of the
Lenine-Trotsky issue, and that before night, spending his money at the
famine prices in the worthless paper, he was a dead-broke millionaire.

During the time American soldiers were in Russia they were paid in
checks drawn on London. During the war, this was at the pegged rate
($4.76-1/4) which had been fixed by agreement between London and New
York bankers to prevent violent fluctuations. But at the end of the war,
after the Armistice, the peg was pulled and the natural course of the
market sent the pound sterling steadily downward, as the American dollar
rose in value as compared with other currencies of the world. To those
who were dealing day by day this was all in the game of money exchange.
But to the soldier in far-off North Russia who had months of pay coming
to him when he left the forests of the Vaga and Onega this was a real
financial hardship. Many a doughboy whose wife or mother was in need at
home because of the rapidly mounting prices put up by the slackers in
the shops and the slackers in the marts of trade, now saw his little pay
check shrink up in exchange value. He felt that his superior officers in
the war department had hardly looked after his interests as well as they
might have done. Major Nichols did succeed at Brest in getting the old
pegged rate for the men and officers, but many had already parted with
the checks at heavy disco