SOME NOTES AS TO THE INVESTMENT OF ENGLISH CAPITAL, AND ALSO BRITISH
PATENT MEDICINES.
It is a very common remark that Americans love to be humbugged. Perhaps
they do, but their English cousins can give them points in this desire.
The ease with which adventurers and bogus schemers get their claws into
English moneybags, is something astounding. Perhaps it is because the
nation has so much money that it don't know what to do with it, or
possibly because the Englishman is naturally credulous, but it is a fact
that London is the paradise of the sharper, and the pleasant pasture for
the bogus speculator.
There are several reasons for it. Interest is very low in England, and
for the man who desires to live "like a gentleman" the temptation to
increase the rate is very strong. Then again there is an immense amount
of capital lying idle and seeking investment, and the man who has just
enough money at three per cent. to live upon very closely, is always
anxious to increase his income by making it six. Every man who has just
money enough to drink beer, has an insatiable thirst for champagne. And
the Englishman who has a strong sense of mercantile honor, naturally has
more faith than the inhabitant of a country where the standard of honor
is lower, and men are, by habit, more cautious of believing.
The papers of London are filled with prospectuses of companies organized
for developing something in all parts of the world, and these
prospectuses are so written that they would deceive the very elect.
The principal point at the beginning is to get a board with a great many
lords, dukes, esquires, and all that sort of thing, on it, the average
Englishman not seeming to realize that there are a good many of these
gentry who are as impecunious as anybody else, and who would do a piece
of roguery for enough to live upon comfortably upon the continent, as
readily as the commonest sharper in the world. The baronet has a stomach
to fill and a back to cover the same as the costermonger. In this, all
humanity stands upon an equality.
Before me lies a respectable paper, its pages filled with glowing
advertisements of projected companies. The first is for the "Acquiring
and further developing the well-known so-and-so gold mine," in
Venezuela.
It begins with the Board of Directors, not one of whom is less in degree
than an Esquire, and several "Sirs" figure in it. Then comes the
bankers--nothing in London is complete without a banker--then
solicitors, then brokers. After this elaborate outfit, all of which
looks as solvent and sound as the Bank of England, comes a glowing
prospectus.
Nothing can be finer than this prospectus. "The property proposed to be
acquird consists of six hundred and fifty-nine acres, which contain the
most of the noted Venezuela gold mines. The vein has been traced on the
surface for a distance of one thousand nine hundred feet," and so on.
Then comes a very complete table showing the profit that _has been_ made
mining in Venezuela, and after this a statement from "Mr. George Atwood,
A. M. Inst., C. E., F. G. S., etc., etc.,"--it would not be complete
without all these initials, even to the etc., the etc., showing that as
learned as is stated there is more behind him,--who makes a statement as
to the probable profits of the enterprise, all of which are as good as
anybody could desire. The estimated profits are set down at twenty per
cent. on the investment.
The capital wanted is two million five hundred thousand dollars, in
shares of five dollars each. You are asked to pay the moderate sum of
sixty-two cents on application, which is modest enough, and the balance
of the five dollars you pay as the work goes on.
[Sidenote: AIR-CASTLES.]
What could be better than this? Here is a man with some money bearing
three per cent., and here is a proposition to give him twenty per cent.
There are "Honorables," and "Sirs," and "Esquires" on the board, and Mr.
Atwood, F. R. S., and all the rest of it, shows that twenty per cent.
has been made in Venezuela. Why should not the man convert some of his
beggarly three per cents. into cash and take a shy at it, as Wall street
would say, and set up his carriage on the profits? True, he don't know
one of the Sirs or Honorables, and Atwood, F. R. S., etc., is quite as
unknown to him. But then the advertisements! They cover half a page in
each paper in London, and that costs an immense sum, and were there not
something in it how could they make that vast expenditure?
He takes it, never dreaming that the speculators who pay for these
advertisements, do it for the purpose of catching just such gudgeons as
he is, knowing, for they know human nature, that the modest
announcements that are made for really solid investments, would not
catch him at all.
There are projected companies for supplying London with fish, all with
boards of directors, and all promising from ten to twenty per cent.
profit, not one of them with less than two million five hundred thousand
dollars capital, in shares of five dollars each. Now there is no city in
the world so well supplied with fish as London, in fact the supply is
far beyond the demand, and there is no city which has cheaper sea food.
There being innumerable private firms in the business, and there being
fish markets everywhere, it would be supposed that a man of fair
intelligence would question the possibility of any new company being
able to compete in the business profitably. But, as in the mining
companies, the array of names, and the deliciously worded prospectus,
are hooks that never fail to catch. It is not the fish in the sea that
these fellows are after.
These are only specimen bricks. There are companies for the development
of iron mines, of tin mines, of copper mines, and all other kinds of
mines in England, Spain, Algeria, India, and everywhere under the sun,
companies proposing to buy vast tracts of land in Iowa, Minnesota,
Wisconsin, Colorado, New Mexico, and everywhere else, each with its
board of noblemen, its bankers and solicitors.
The American sharpers who have mines in Colorado and Nevada have reaped
a rich harvest. The city is full of them. You shall see about the place
where Americans most do congregate, sharp faced fellows, dressed very
seedily, whose trowsers are chewed off at the heel, and whose coats bear
unmistakable evidence of having passed through the renovator's hands a
great many times, and would again if their proprietors only had the
one-and-nine pence necessary, or had another to wear while it was being
done, the said coats buttoned very closely to the throat, so closely
that a cheap scarf conceals the condition of the shirt beneath, if
happily there be one, standing listlessly, as if waiting for some one
who will never come.
They know you to be an American at once, and one introduces himself,
claiming to have seen you in the States:
"What are you doing here?" is your first inquiry.
"Oh, I have been here a year. I came over to place a mine I own in
Nevada."
"How are you getting on?"
"Splendid! I just sold the half of it for five hundred thousand dollars.
I ought to have got more for it, but I am tired of waiting, and want to
get home, and so I let it go. Five hundred thousand dollars is a good
sum, and then I retain a half interest in it. It will make me all the
money I shall ever want. By the way have you met any of the nobility?
No? I shall be glad to introduce you to the Duke of Buccleugh. I am
going down to his country seat to-morrow. He is interested with me, and
he's a devilish clever fellow."
You plead a prior engagement if you are wise, but you have not seen the
last of your American friend who has just sold the half of a mine for
five hundred thousand dollars. Oh, no! For the next day he will be
waiting for you, and he will volunteer to go about with you in so
persistent a way that you cannot refuse without being brutally blunt,
and after taking you to all sorts of show places which are open to
anybody, and which you want no guide for, he will establish himself in
such a way as to make you feel, whether or no, that he has some claim
upon you.
Then comes the final stroke. As you part with him, he will take you one
side, and then this:
[Sidenote: THE AMERICAN MINE-OWNER.]
"By the way, I am waiting for the final drawing of papers to complete
the sale, when I get my money. I have been here so long that I have
exhausted my ready money, and my remittances did not come by the last
steamer, but they must come by the next, which will be Saturday. Would
you mind lending me five pounds till Saturday?"
You have but little pocket-money, you say.
"An order on the American Exchange will do as well."
You never give orders.
He lowers his want, till, finally, when he gets down to five shillings
you give it to him, glad to be rid of him so cheaply.
Nevertheless this fellow will finally sell his mine, or his alleged
mine. All he has to do is to wait long enough, and he will find some
credulous Englishman who will bite at the naked hook, and put his name
and influence to it, and it will be done. Then he will go home and
establish himself in good style, and be a prominent man.
But what becomes of the English investors? Echo answers. It is a
conundrum that goes echoing down the ages, and will only be answered in
that period of the next world when everything shall be made plain. The
poor widow who put her little pittance in the hands of these sharks
doubtless started a private school, if she was qualified for it, or made
use of her one accomplishment, painting, music or what not, to earn a
miserable existence. The poor clerk who was saving to purchase a home of
his own, went back to his lodgings and put his nose freshly upon the
grindstone, and the young tradesman went into bankruptcy, his shop
passed out of his hands, and he served where he had once commanded. And
the shark, if an English one, shelters himself behind his assumed name,
or goes to the Continent, and lives in luxury all his days.
Inasmuch as these things have been going on ever since the South Sea
bubble it would seem that people would get wiser, and know better than
to put their all in such wild-cat schemes. But bear this in mind, the
loser never admits that he lost in so stupid a way, and his fellows are
never fully informed about it, and besides there are children born every
day, a certain percentage of them with sharp teeth, and the rest with
fat. The teeth find the fat, the shark finds the gudgeon invariably.
That's his business. When I read these prospectuses I find myself
getting up a great deal of respect for the old barons who, when they
wanted money, seized a rich Jew and starved him awhile in a dungeon, and
if that gentle treatment did not suffice to extract the requisite cash,
pulled out his teeth, one by one, till he disgorged. In those days a
venerable Jew whose teeth were all gone was as fortunate as the man
caught by the Indians who was bald and wore a wig--he saved his scalp.
[Illustration: THE OLD ENGLISH WAY OF PROCURING A LOAN.]
[Sidenote: LONDON QUACKS.]
These ancient robbers did not add grandiloquent lying to theft. It was
with them a simple taking of what they wanted without circumlocution.
It was highway robbery to picking pockets, and was certainly the
preferable of the two.
Were I an Emperor, with absolute power, I should immediately discharge
the honest soldier, who would work for a living were he out of the
service, and draft in the army all these fellows. And the regiments
composed of them should lead every forlorn hope, charge every battery,
and do all the dangerous and fatiguing work that soldiers have to do. A
country could afford to lose a great many battles to rid itself of these
worse than thieves.
Do you remember Dickens' Montagu Tigg in Martin Chuzzlewit? I used to
think it an overdrawn picture, but it is not. It is as correct a
portrait as was ever limned.
America has been deemed the paradise of the quack, but before England
she must pale her ineffectual fires. Next to beer, patent medicines
stare you in the face everywhere. The walls fairly shine with the
advertisements of remedies for every disease known to the faculty, and
when that supply runs out the ingenious proprietor invents a stock of
new ailments that never did exist, and inasmuch as the least of them are
six syllabled ones, it is to be hoped never will.
There are medicines for the liver, for the kidneys, for the lungs, for
the feet, for the head, for the ears, for the eyes, for the scalp, for
the hair, and for every part and parcel of the human body, and for every
animal that man has subjugated and brought subservient to his will.
There are certificates from Lords, and Dukes, and Honorables, as to the
efficiency of Hobson's Vermifuge, though with these it is always a
tenant's child that was cured, the scions of noble houses being of too
blue blood to ever have so vulgar a complaint. In case of gout, or any
genuinely aristocratic ailment, they are not so particular.
The advertisement of every remedy ends with the announcement:--
"As there are unprincipled parties in the kingdom who seize upon every
article of known merit, to imitate the same, the purchasers of Hobson's
remedies are respectfully requested to particularly observe the label on
the bottles. The name of "Hobson" is printed on the steel engraving, on
the face of the bottle, fourteen hundred and sixty-three times, and
without this none are genuine. Beware of fraudulent imitations."
And the British dame will stand at the counter and count the wearying
repetition, much to the disgust of the shopman, who, knowing that the
remedy is only three days old, and that there are no imitations, and
never will be, wants her to take her bottle of the stuff and move on and
make room for another victim.
[Illustration: "BEWARE OF FRAUDULENT IMITATIONS."]
[Sidenote: THE LONDON ADVERTISER.]
Their ingenuity in advertising is as good as that of their
trans-Atlantic brethren. You see vast vans driven slowly up and down the
streets, built up twenty feet with canvass, showing an emaciated mortal,
with scarcely an hour of life in him, with the legend underneath,
"Before taking Gobson's Elixir," and the same party dressed, and walking
the streets with the physical perfection of a prize fighter, and
underneath, "After taking Gobson's Elixir." Transparencies at night
flash forth the miraculous virtues of "Hopkins' Saline Draught," and
there isn't an inch of dead wall anywhere that has not its burden of
announcements. Long processions of ragged men the most of them too old
and weak to do anything else, march along the sidewalks sandwiched
between two boards, each one bearing testimony to the virtues of some
wonderful compound, there being enough of them to weary the eye and make
one wish he could go somewhere where advertising was impossible.
One of these human sandwiches remarked to me that the boards were a
little uncomfortable in the Summer, but the two made a mighty good
overcoat in the Winter.
And as if there was not enough of it already, an enterprising Yankee is
here with a steam whale, ninety feet long, spouting water sixty feet
high, the machinery and crew concealed in the boat on which it rests,
which is to ply up and down the beautiful Thames, bearing upon either
side the announcement of a liver pill. The proprietor gives him ten
thousand dollars for the use of it for the season, and bears all the
expenses of running it. It is very like a whale, and as it attracts much
attention will doubtless pay a handsome profit to the man by whom it has
been engaged.
The papers are full of such advertising, the only difference between
England and America being that the advertisements here are more
elegantly written, and couched in really superior English which ours are
not, always. The English shoemaker who turns doctor, employs the best
literary talent at command to write his announcements, and he pays more
liberally than the magazines do the same men. Many a London writer,
struggling for fame and a place in literature, makes a handsome addition
to his slender income by going into the service of these patent medicine
vendors.
Nearly all of them succeed. The British public are a medicine-taking
people by nature. There are not many diseases upon the island naturally,
but the inhabitants create a very large number by their habits. The
universal use of beer--and vile stuff it is--is not conducive to general
health, and the Englishman is about the heartiest eater on the globe. He
is more than hearty--he verges very closely upon the gluttonous.
Consequently he needs medicines, and the manufacturers adapt themselves
to the market. There are more than a thousand "after dinner pills,"
warranted to correct all the effect of "over-indulgence at the table,"
which means that it will do something toward keeping up a man who eats
about four times what he ought to, and drinks enough every year to drive
an American or Frenchman into delirium tremens.
The market for these goods is world-wide, and enormous fortunes are
amassed. I must say, however, that the trade is not in the best repute.
Many brewers have been knighted, but no patent medicine man. In the
matter of ennobling people the line must be drawn somewhere. Dickens'
barber drew it at the baker--the English draw it at the brewer.
[Illustration: THE OLD TEMPLE BAR.]