But there is to be said about gold mining ways of the old time,
that Tyre sought gold with actual ships, with actual men and
mining implements. The peninsula of Sinai did not sell stock, but
mined actual gold. Gold in those days meant actual risk and
courage. Perhaps even then fraudulent promoters weren't unknown;
but he who ventured, in the days of Vespasian or Hannibal or
Hiram, too prominently to gild the gold brick certainly lost his
head. The mining of gold was then a sober and serious and honest
matter.
In America we place the gold brick ahead of the gold mine. We mix
alloy of duplicity and greed with the virgin metal of our
standard of value. By improved mining methods we nearly double
our output of gold, and so cheapen it by well-nigh a half. This
shrunken gold dollar is small enough; but that is not all. We
adulterate and divide it by, say, another half when we falsely
double its cost. This we certainly do when we issue counterfeit
promises as against good coin; for in civilization and commerce
always the genuine coinage has to pay the cost of the
counterfeit. Your tailor charges you a stiff price for your suit
of clothes. That covers the clothes of the dead beats who did not
pay. To allow the sale of a fraudulent mining stock is to
depreciate the basis of this country's values. Such a wrong ought
not to be allowed in a country claiming an enlightened
government.
It is the thief who is protected in America, not his dupe. The
old law of caveat emptor protects the SELLER of fake mining
stocks, not the BUYER of them. There is little or no actually
enforced law to protect the latter. That is to say, there is
little or no actually enforced law to protect those who most need
protection, those of small incomes, orphans who have no
guardians, wage earners who have little education, widows whose
life insurance is not quite enough to support them, women engaged
in the desperate battle of life and needing more money, quick
money, better to protect themselves. The fence between these and
the natural perils of the world is slight enough. In America we
break it down entirely.
We offer these helpless ones freely as victims to the greater
cunning and strength of men wholly without sense of business
honor or personal decency. When we do this, we also attack the
whole system of savings banks, which is, or should be, the very
bulwark of a nation's financial safety. Says the wolf to the
widow, to the busy professional man, to the clerk, the
stenographer, the wage earner: "Take your money out of the
savings bank. What is three per cent. a year, when I can make you
three hundred per cent. a year? Give your money to me!" We permit
that. Our national government does not undertake to put a stop to
it; our states do not undertake to do so; and this fact is more
possible through actual lack of proper statutes than through any
misinterpretation or lack of enforcement of the law.
The field is one devised by nature for the trickster. His success
does not depend altogether on human gullibility; part of his
argument rests on the conditions which surround the industry of
mining, one which never can be free of extreme risk. All men know
that gold is found far away, where living is high and means of
transportation are scarce; that it costs large sums to find and
dig it, and that such sums are more easily raised among the many
than among the few. None of these attending features has weight
to stop the capitalization of bona-fide enterprises. These latter
are used as bait by men who have nothing bona-fide to offer, and
who make their fattest profits out of their shallowest shafts.