HONEST MINING IN HANNIBAL'S TIME
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.