Shows thrive best on bluster and buncombe. Years of experience have
taught me that the traveling show business handled by capitalists who
have been trained in other lines of enterprise can never succeed. I
have often been reproved by business men who were astounded at the
lavish and apparently wasteful expenditures of the circus for "show and
blow," and who have insisted that these expenses should be cut in half.
It is true that such reckless expenditures in any ordinary commercial
undertaking would be disastrous, but it is the life of a big show. When
it is possible thoroughly to arouse the curiosity of the public,
expense should be a secondary consideration.