A groan issues from Soviet Russia over the iniquity of luxury taxes. The owner of a grand piano must now pay an annual duty of 750,000 roubles, while common people who have only the ordinary sort of piano are assessed at 600,000 roubles. Then the kind of household with only a phonograph is stuck for 200,000. Accordingly there is wailing and gnashing of teeth among the musical. It all sounds very dreadful, ruinous in fact, but on consideration we more-happily placed mortals may, perhaps, keep our sympathy for ourselves. Let us see what these apparently gigantic sums mean. In recent business transactions _between the United States and Russia the gold dollar was given conventional value of 500,000 roubles, but as a matter of fact it was found impossible to "peg
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.