Arizona republican., 1900-10-05


 do nOt have to be verified on occasions when reCounts are made.
 The bond vault is to be enlarged greatly - doubling it's capacity - a change made necessary by Ghe in creasing number of national banks which deposit bonds in the treasury. Many private and state hanks. taking advantage Of the recent act of congress are coming in national banks. A new and thoroughly modern strong room is to be built for the registers of fee, to hold cancelled paper money that i= awaiting destruction in the macera- ter. - dlwhile the sub-treasury in New York is putting in two additional vaults, or for gold and the oth-r for silver the alter measI1r'-- lJrty-save1 feet in leng ' a~F tH.alve feet in height. Gold and sllvlr aIe pouring in there by tons daily, and there is no place to put all of it. At the present time that sub treasury has on hand TO million dol lars in gold coin and 5S million dollars in silver.
 The are now 152 million silver dollars | in the treasury at Washington, but only S6.CS0000 in gold coin. The treasu- ry never keeps much gold on hand here,
 the great stock of the yellow metal be- ! ing held in New York and at the mint
 in Philadelphia. If one wants to see crude gold in masses he should visit the mint in the Quaker city where he 1 will find it stacked up in heaps of ! bIickS-tons on tons of it-all ready for ! conversion into coin. At the present
 moment there are g million dollars ! worth of gold bullion at this mint, with l q million dollars in gold coin, not to 1 bullion and coin.
 | Notwithstanding the fact that the l treasury vaults compare so poorly with | the impregnable. steel structures
 now used by great private concerns l that have vaIuables to protect, the ] government feels fairly secure as to the | safety of its s;ored wealth The best 1 sa feguard for coin is its weight. Just | to illustrate this point it may be men, | toned that the 152 million dollars in silver now held in the strong rooms of i the treasury to weigh nearly 5000 tons. | A million dollars in gold weighs l about two tons, and it would 1 carry off s50.OO0 Of the yellow
 stuff Though a gold brick the size and
 shape of an ordinary building brick { represents $s,OOO, its "heft" is some
 thing astonishing. Suggestions have
 been made that it might be practicable i to burrCw beneath the treasury by tun- nel. and thus pillage Uncle Sam's cof- feTs by a sort of rat hole method, but { even if this were accomplished, it is 1 difficult to imagine how it would be practicable to remove much of the coin. There was quite scare few years ago. when Gilfilin was treasurer, be- , cause the vault in the cash room where i the ready money is kept refused to . open. It is always set for S:S0 a. m.,
 with d time lock. but on this occasion something seemed to be wrong with the
 mechanism and the steel doors remain
 ed C3stinately closed. Nine o'clock ar
 rived and still the money was locked up. For once Uncle Sam's bank was obliged to suspend payments. Experts
 were sent for and came with their tools ] to break open the vault, but before they
 got there the big safe had opened of its
 own accord. It turned out that the
 time lock had been set by accident for
 9:30 o'clock.
 In this vault not only gold and sil- yer, but many millions in paper money
 are always kept. If thieves could ob- tain access to it they might easily walk
 away with an enormous sum, the notes and certificates being done up in pack
 ages and neatly labeled with the sums they contain in large red figures. Each
 package holds 4,000 notes and is in size just about a foot cube. If the denom- 1 ination is $500 a single such package l represents two million dollars. How ever. if anyone did succeed in getting i away with cash in this shape he could hardly fail to be caught, inasmuch as the numbers of the bills would be ad-
 vertised immediately and every bank
 in the country would be on the lookout fer them.
 Burglars may be practically eXclud- ed, but the treasury does not claim to ! be theft-proof. On an unlucky day in 1870 a stranger came into the ;r5asur- l CTS room with a large Panama hat in , his hand. The treasurer's attention 1 was distracted by some ether people 1 who were trying to talk to him. and the
 man dropped his hat carelessly over package containing 2,000 S10 notes lying
 on the desk. l. was one of several such | packages and the loss of it was not mo-
 ticed until several hours later. Of , course. the notes Were advertised, and i some time afseIward rart of them
 
 ] The depositor was arr ested, but nobody
 was punished for the crime.
 ! A singular immunity from punish
 ment seems to have attended thieves 1 who have robbed the treasury in such | ways In 1875 a clerk named Benjamin Halock passed a package of $500 notes, i representing 4T000, out of a windCW ! in the cash room to a saloon keeper i named Ottman. For some time the robbery remainde a mystery. but later , on one Theodore Brown was caught i ! citing un the races at Saratoga with some of the missing $500 notes. He was arrested and implicated Ottnan and i HallOck. but Brown was never tried. and the other two were not finally con
 victed. Of the stolen money $20.O00 was 1 recovered.
 | It has been said that no trust compa- , ny would accept the responsibility of 1 the treasurer of the United States for 1 the $6,000 a year salary that he gets. { He is responsible for all moneys that