Author of "The Mississippi Bubble," "54-40 or Fight," etc.
EDITOR'S NOTE.—It is time vigorous efforts were made to stop the cruel frauds perpetrated on the name of one of the world's greatest industries. Mining is a legitimate and honorable enterprise. It contributes immensely to the national wealth. It has been the source of some of our great fortunes. Because there is something magical in the suggestion of gold or coal or copper taken out of the ground, sharpers have made mining an instrument of successful deception. They have tricked people into investing their savings in worthless or even non-existent mines. Perhaps you who read this have bitten at an advertisement in a reputable publication, which pretended to place the wealth of some western El Dorado at your feet for a few hundred dollars. Doubtless your money has disappeared. It is for the purpose of giving you the protection of a knowledge both of legitimate mining and of the ways of thieves that this article is published.
AMERICA is the land of the free and the country of opportunity for all. Incidentally, it is free hunting-ground for sharpers, and a land of opportunity for the unscrupulous. No such chances for fraudulent business exist anywhere else in the world. Americans are the richest people on earth, and the most easily parted from their money. Those whose sole ambition is to get rich quick very frequently help some other man to get rich quick. Society owes no debt to either of these. It is obliged to support them both. This is wrong both as a moral and as an industrial proposition. Once, a dollar was spent to mine a dollar. To-day two are spent: One dollar goes into blasting powder, the other into advertising and office furniture.
No doubt you have heard the age-old legend of the Mother Vein of Gold, which appears and vanishes, now and again, in this corner of the world. Superstition regarding this great original vein of gold is found wherever men seek the precious metal. The feverish Spaniards called this phantom lode the Madre d'Oro, or "Mother of Gold." Now it is located in Mexico, now in India or Peru, California or Australia. Tradition says that Montezuma got his gold from this great vein, which lay in a secret valley whose where-abouts was jealously guarded by three priests of the war tribe, sole possessors of the knowledge. Any intruder who by chance or design looked down into this valley was smitten absolutely blind. Tradition among the successors of the Aztecs says that when Montezuma passed, the Madre d'Oro sank back again into the earth, and has been seen no more. Men still follow the phantom vein. Those who see it, even in their dreams, still are smitten blind.
Gold! There is no other word that means quite so much. We want gold; indeed, we must have it. Malleable, divisible, indestructible, rare, it is the indispensable medium of exchange. It is our chosen unit of power and success, the measure of civilization and human attainment. Hence it has always been the object of human desire. The Golden Fleece very probably was the sheepskin bottom of an old-time sluice-box, in a day when they used wool, instead of blankets, below the rocker troughs. In the vast ruined civilization of Southeast Africa unknown men once mined probably $400,000,000 worth of gold. There are mines profitably operated in Greece to-day which the Phoenicians opened 1,200 B. C. Sixteen hundred years later the Romans owned all the mines in Europe. Hannibal once paid his warriors in gold coin of Carthage. Egypt was settled by the Semitic races 2,500 B. C., because of the gold that was found there. A thousand years later Job knew about gold, and five hundred years later still, King Solomon showed what an abundance of wives and what a reputation for wisdom a man can get when he has unlimited gold mines back of him. Columbus found America when he was searching for the wealth of Ormus and of Ind. Cortez and Pizarro toiled and slew in the hope of finding the Madre d'Oro. The great discoveries of the world have been made by men in search of gold. The great voyages of exploration were in part piratical voyages made in search of gold already found and mined by others.
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.