FISCAL: Small Change

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In April 1792, Congress passed and President Washington signed a bill declaring: "If any of the gold or silver coins . . . shall be debased or made worse as to the proportion of fine gold or fine silver therein contained or shall be of less weight or value than the same ought to be ... through the default or connivance of any of the officers or person who shall be employed at the said Mint . . . every such officer or person . . shall be deemed guilty of Felony and shall suffer death." Today this penalty has been modified to read that if the President so decides "the officers implicated . . . shall be thenceforward disqualified from holding their respective offices." Since 1792 there has been a annual assay commission to test the coins of the Republic.

At 10 o'clock one morning last week in a sunlit room of the great white marble U. S. Mint in Philadelphia, the guardians of honest money assembled to do their annual duty. The testers were mostly deserving Democrats appointed by the President: Judge John H. Druffel of the Court of Common Pleas at Cincinnati, Mayor James H. Hurley of Willimantic, Conn., Mrs. Katharine Elkus White, Democratic leader of Red Bank, N. J., Novelist Owen Johnson of Stockbridge, Mass., a realtor from Manhattan, a club woman from Baltimore, an insurance man from Jersey City, etc., etc. Also present as ex-officio testers were the Federal Judge of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, Oliver B. Dickinson (one of 25 Federal Judge out of favor at the White House, for he is 79), Comptroller of the Currency J. I T. O'Connor, and the two gentlemen who were to do most of the work, Joseph 5 Buford, Chief Assayer of the U. S. Assay Office in Manhattan and Dr. F. S. Holbrook of the Bureau of Standards in Washington. Finally, as required by law, the chief testee was on hand: Nellie Tayloe Ross, Director of the Mint.

With the pop eyes of ignorance most of the testers looked on the great pyx*—, an ancient chest three feet square, used according to records for 98 years, and no one knows how much longer. Ceremonially its great padlocks were removed, its lid thrown back, its twelve inner compartments, one for each month, revealed. In each compartment were labeled bags of coin, the heaviest freight which the old pyx had ever borne: 92,492 pieces of small change, samples of the 184,843,732 coins† minted at Philadelphia, San Francisco and Denver in 1936.

The tyros of the Assay Commission divided into three sub-committees to undertake their tasks. Task No. 1 was to count the contents of sample bags and de termine that the Mints had set aside as required for testing one silver coin out of every 2,000 minted.** Task No. 2, under the direction of Assayer Buford, was to assay sample coins taken at random from all denominations and all Mints to determine that they were individually and as a group 900 fine or within a fraction there of. Task No. 3, under the direction of Dr. Holbrook, was to weigh some 300 sample coins and make sure that none of them was more than 1.5 grains†† heavier or lighter than the standards set by law.

Result: no coins bad, no officers to be dismissed, no heads to be lopped off. In 137 years there has never been any other report.