“We offer at par of $10 each, 1,000 shares of our Guaranteed 7 per cent. Preferred Stock, cumulative dividends, payable quarterly ... Profits on business done last year were 54 cents for every dollar expended ... We guarantee absolute security for your investment. Safer than a bank.” [Italics ours.—Ed.]
We are told that at present the Enteronol Company manufactures two products: a castor-oil preparation, known as fig-ol, and enteronol. Very shortly, however, the company expects to “add seven equally efficient products.”
“The average cost to manufacture, ready to ship, a dollar’s worth of these goods is less than ten cents.”
“In enteronol alone, the company has fortunes and the only thing needed to bring tremendous results and dividends of 100 per cent. is the proper amount of judicious advertising.”
Here are some samples of the judicious (?) advertising:
“One Christian missionary, the Rev. Paul Singh of Jubbulpore, India, testifies that he cured thirteen severe cases of Asiatic Cholera with a box containing less than thirty tablets” [of enteronol].
“Wm. F. Oldham, bishop of Southern Asia, writes us that enteronol cured nine cases out of ten of Asiatic Cholera. Now just think of India and China with their 800,000,000 people who are dying by the thousands of a disease which we have the power to cure so easily.”
How like a discourse by that delightful character of Mark Twain’s—the visionary Colonel Sellers—this reads. As he said about his “Infallible, Imperial, Oriental Optic Liniment”:
“Why in the Oriental countries ... every square mile of ground upholds its thousands on thousands of struggling human creatures—and every separate and individual devil of them’s got the ophthalmia.”
The prospective stockholder is told that an ordinary business concern reaches the limit of financial possibilities in a few years, but: