NEEDED: A FEDERAL BUREAU OF MINES
The enactment of good mining laws, punishing the proved intent to commit a fraud as well as the fraud itself, and seeing to it that capital stock shall be paid up, seeing to it also that all moneys spent by a mining corporation shall be traceable from start to finish, is the natural first step toward the purification of American mining methods. Beyond that, the national government could take a hand in the game through a federal Bureau of Mines. There must be some clearing-house of intelligence and of values in this country, some place from which our intelligence may start and to which it may return. The public must have accessible reports of engineers, state or federal, of a sort entitled to confidence.
The nest of vermin in our large cities, inhabited by those who make a living out of the ignorance and eagerness of small investors, must be smoked out once and for all. In this work, state and national governments, popular education and intelligence, and the aid of the better class journalism of America, all must be enlisted. The pages of our press might well be far cleaner than they are. The publication which prints the advertisements of a fake-mining enterprise is itself a party to the fraud. A Bureau of Mines chief can sit behind the desk of every advertising manager in the counting-rooms of every newspaper and magazine in America. The press of this country, when it likes, can, by taking thought, somewhat dim the splendor of the mahogany in many an elegant suite of offices in New York, Boston, or elsewhere. It can reduce the reckless and senseless expenditure of ill-gained wealth which is making civilization a mockery in America, and branding our republican form of government as a failure.
We will have a different way of life, or another form of government. We will have a better administration of law in the United States or we will have another political party, possibly another political system. We will clear up this rotten society, or we will try how we like a different organization of society. The people of America are beginning to murmur. The burden of the murmur is that they have long enough been betrayed. Unspeakable injustice has been done the people of America under the forms of law and government. It is coming to be said that our law and government have not an even hand for all, that a few are allowed to despoil the many. When a people murmurs, let a government beware. Meantime the more that certain unspeakable things are reduced in, and eliminated from, Wall Street and the other "financial centers," the better for our schools, our taxes, our farming, our industry, our living, our CHARACTER, our country.
After all, the government of this country, as we now have it organized, depends on the CHARACTER of its average individual citizen. The end of this abuse of fake-mining enterprises begins now, here, with you and me, in OUR intelligence, in OUR love of a square game. By taking thought we can add a cubit to our OWN stature, and so add to the stature of OUR laws and of our national morality.
WHAT YOU AND I CAN DO
As for you and me, when next we see the flaming advertisement advising us that the Madre d'Oro, Montezuma's fabled Mother Vein of Gold, has once more come to the surface of the earth on Manhattan Island or near Plymouth Rock; when next we read counsel that because mining pays in Michigan it ought to pay in Nevada; when next we are advised to get into the game at once because this is our LAST CHANCE—we might at least ask to see the report of the engineer, likewise the record and antecedents of the engineer; and many, many other things. Perchance we might write and ask the mining promoter what, in his belief, is the proper amortization charge in his particular mine. At which the average mining promoter would probably fall dead.
***************************************************************** Vol. XXIII No.1 JULY 1910
HOW THE MAN CAME TO TWINKLING ISLAND {page 64-73}
By MELVILLE CHATER
OUT of the great world came a man to the wooing of Susanna Crane. From the vague southwest he came, now skirting the chimneyed towns and elm-bordered village streets, now exchanging the road for the bright rails and perhaps the interior of a droning freight-car, now switching anew through the edge of odorous pine woods, yet leaving behind him always a wary, broken trail.