Honesty is the best policy. The type of man I have described can not thrive for long. He must evidently suffer total eclipse. The business of this world is founded and builded upon individual integrity. The business man who allows himself to be used to carry out the base purposes of men in high places forfeits the respect of those whom he serves, is forever afterwards mistrusted by them, and loses caste in the very set he tries to gain favor with.
I charge that powerful, dishonest interests on Wall Street found it necessary for selfish reasons that I be put out of business. I declare that they bided their time until newspaper clamor against so-called Get-Rich-Quick promoters had been fostered, aroused and stimulated to a point where citizens became imbued with the idea that all promoters who use the advertising columns of newspapers are crooks. And I aver that when the Government used upon me and my associates its rare power of seizure, search and confiscation, it was with no evidence that any Government statute had been violated. In this and the concluding chapter of "My Adventures with Your Money" I state the facts which I believe prove these statements to the last syllable.
GOOD BIG FISH VS. BAD LITTLE FISH
Ask the casual newspaper reader to define offhand the compound adjective Get-Rich-Quick and he will tell you it is applied solely to professional promoters who employ flamboyant advertising methods, promise great speculative profits, use other devices which are calculated to separate the public from its money, and are in every instance dishonest. That is the idea which powerful "interests" have inculcated in the public mind by subtle, insistent press-agenting.
Time and again during the progress of "My Adventures with Your Money" I have endeavored to show that the really dangerous Get-Rich-Quick forces are the men in high places who, by the artful and insidious use of the news columns of "friendly" publications and others which copy from them, divorce the public from millions upon millions.
I said in my foreword the following:
The more dangerous malefactors are the men in high places who take a good property, overcapitalize it, appraise its value at many times what it is worth, use artful methods to beguile the thinking public into believing the stock is worth par or more, and foist it on investors at a figure which robs them of great sums of money. There are more than a million victims of this practice in the United States.
No man has right to assume that a promoter who sells stock by means of display advertising in the newspapers is per se a Get-Rich-Quick operator. There are honest professional promoters of the display advertising variety and there are dishonest ones, just as there are honest promoters of the multimillionaire kind and dishonest ones.
The on-the-level, trumpet-tongued mining promoter, who believes in newspaper advertising and successfully finances companies by appealing uproariously to the speculative investing public, performs an actual service and is entitled to a place among honorable men. Indeed, he is the hero of the prospector and "poor" mine owner of the West. He alone stands between these men and grasping monopoly.
Mine men, stockholders, and financiers the country over understand this, although the Eastern newspaper-reading public has been taught to believe that this type of promoter must be a Get-Rich-Quick operator.