The authorities here have a strange custom, which I do not know of obtaining elsewhere, of controlling the price of silver. A proclamation was issued recently forbidding merchants to buy or sell the tael for over three "tiaos" (ie. 1,500 actual cash). Consequently, though' a tael is bringing much more than that in the market towns around, in the capital the price has remained stationary at three "'tiaos" for weeks, I understand that some of the Russians have protested against this artificial controlling of the money market. There must be a "squeeze" somewhere.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.