CHAPTER VIII.

SOME NOTES AS TO THE INVESTMENT OF ENGLISH CAPITAL, AND ALSO BRITISH PATENT MEDICINES.

It is a very common remark that Americans love to be humbugged. Perhaps they do, but their English cousins can give them points in this desire. The ease with which adventurers and bogus schemers get their claws into English moneybags, is something astounding. Perhaps it is because the nation has so much money that it don't know what to do with it, or possibly because the Englishman is naturally credulous, but it is a fact that London is the paradise of the sharper, and the pleasant pasture for the bogus speculator.

There are several reasons for it. Interest is very low in England, and for the man who desires to live "like a gentleman" the temptation to increase the rate is very strong. Then again there is an immense amount of capital lying idle and seeking investment, and the man who has just enough money at three per cent. to live upon very closely, is always anxious to increase his income by making it six. Every man who has just money enough to drink beer, has an insatiable thirst for champagne. And the Englishman who has a strong sense of mercantile honor, naturally has more faith than the inhabitant of a country where the standard of honor is lower, and men are, by habit, more cautious of believing.

The papers of London are filled with prospectuses of companies organized for developing something in all parts of the world, and these prospectuses are so written that they would deceive the very elect.

The principal point at the beginning is to get a board with a great many lords, dukes, esquires, and all that sort of thing, on it, the average Englishman not seeming to realize that there are a good many of these gentry who are as impecunious as anybody else, and who would do a piece of roguery for enough to live upon comfortably upon the continent, as readily as the commonest sharper in the world. The baronet has a stomach to fill and a back to cover the same as the costermonger. In this, all humanity stands upon an equality.

Before me lies a respectable paper, its pages filled with glowing advertisements of projected companies. The first is for the "Acquiring and further developing the well-known so-and-so gold mine," in Venezuela.

It begins with the Board of Directors, not one of whom is less in degree than an Esquire, and several "Sirs" figure in it. Then comes the bankers--nothing in London is complete without a banker--then solicitors, then brokers. After this elaborate outfit, all of which looks as solvent and sound as the Bank of England, comes a glowing prospectus.

Nothing can be finer than this prospectus. "The property proposed to be acquird consists of six hundred and fifty-nine acres, which contain the most of the noted Venezuela gold mines. The vein has been traced on the surface for a distance of one thousand nine hundred feet," and so on. Then comes a very complete table showing the profit that _has been_ made mining in Venezuela, and after this a statement from "Mr. George Atwood, A. M. Inst., C. E., F. G. S., etc., etc.,"--it would not be complete without all these initials, even to the etc., the etc., showing that as learned as is stated there is more behind him,--who makes a statement as to the probable profits of the enterprise, all of which are as good as anybody could desire. The estimated profits are set down at twenty per cent. on the investment.

The capital wanted is two million five hundred thousand dollars, in shares of five dollars each. You are asked to pay the moderate sum of sixty-two cents on application, which is modest enough, and the balance of the five dollars you pay as the work goes on.

[Sidenote: AIR-CASTLES.]

What could be better than this? Here is a man with some money bearing three per cent., and here is a proposition to give him twenty per cent. There are "Honorables," and "Sirs," and "Esquires" on the board, and Mr. Atwood, F. R. S., and all the rest of it, shows that twenty per cent. has been made in Venezuela. Why should not the man convert some of his beggarly three per cents. into cash and take a shy at it, as Wall street would say, and set up his carriage on the profits? True, he don't know one of the Sirs or Honorables, and Atwood, F. R. S., etc., is quite as unknown to him. But then the advertisements! They cover half a page in each paper in London, and that costs an immense sum, and were there not something in it how could they make that vast expenditure?

He takes it, never dreaming that the speculators who pay for these advertisements, do it for the purpose of catching just such gudgeons as he is, knowing, for they know human nature, that the modest announcements that are made for really solid investments, would not catch him at all.

There are projected companies for supplying London with fish, all with boards of directors, and all promising from ten to twenty per cent. profit, not one of them with less than two million five hundred thousand dollars capital, in shares of five dollars each. Now there is no city in the world so well supplied with fish as London, in fact the supply is far beyond the demand, and there is no city which has cheaper sea food. There being innumerable private firms in the business, and there being fish markets everywhere, it would be supposed that a man of fair intelligence would question the possibility of any new company being able to compete in the business profitably. But, as in the mining companies, the array of names, and the deliciously worded prospectus, are hooks that never fail to catch. It is not the fish in the sea that these fellows are after.

These are only specimen bricks. There are companies for the development of iron mines, of tin mines, of copper mines, and all other kinds of mines in England, Spain, Algeria, India, and everywhere under the sun, companies proposing to buy vast tracts of land in Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Colorado, New Mexico, and everywhere else, each with its board of noblemen, its bankers and solicitors.

The American sharpers who have mines in Colorado and Nevada have reaped a rich harvest. The city is full of them. You shall see about the place where Americans most do congregate, sharp faced fellows, dressed very seedily, whose trowsers are chewed off at the heel, and whose coats bear unmistakable evidence of having passed through the renovator's hands a great many times, and would again if their proprietors only had the one-and-nine pence necessary, or had another to wear while it was being done, the said coats buttoned very closely to the throat, so closely that a cheap scarf conceals the condition of the shirt beneath, if happily there be one, standing listlessly, as if waiting for some one who will never come.

They know you to be an American at once, and one introduces himself, claiming to have seen you in the States:

"What are you doing here?" is your first inquiry.

"Oh, I have been here a year. I came over to place a mine I own in Nevada."

"How are you getting on?"

"Splendid! I just sold the half of it for five hundred thousand dollars. I ought to have got more for it, but I am tired of waiting, and want to get home, and so I let it go. Five hundred thousand dollars is a good sum, and then I retain a half interest in it. It will make me all the money I shall ever want. By the way have you met any of the nobility? No? I shall be glad to introduce you to the Duke of Buccleugh. I am going down to his country seat to-morrow. He is interested with me, and he's a devilish clever fellow."

You plead a prior engagement if you are wise, but you have not seen the last of your American friend who has just sold the half of a mine for five hundred thousand dollars. Oh, no! For the next day he will be waiting for you, and he will volunteer to go about with you in so persistent a way that you cannot refuse without being brutally blunt, and after taking you to all sorts of show places which are open to anybody, and which you want no guide for, he will establish himself in such a way as to make you feel, whether or no, that he has some claim upon you.

Then comes the final stroke. As you part with him, he will take you one side, and then this:

[Sidenote: THE AMERICAN MINE-OWNER.]

"By the way, I am waiting for the final drawing of papers to complete the sale, when I get my money. I have been here so long that I have exhausted my ready money, and my remittances did not come by the last steamer, but they must come by the next, which will be Saturday. Would you mind lending me five pounds till Saturday?"

You have but little pocket-money, you say.

"An order on the American Exchange will do as well."

You never give orders.

He lowers his want, till, finally, when he gets down to five shillings you give it to him, glad to be rid of him so cheaply.

Nevertheless this fellow will finally sell his mine, or his alleged mine. All he has to do is to wait long enough, and he will find some credulous Englishman who will bite at the naked hook, and put his name and influence to it, and it will be done. Then he will go home and establish himself in good style, and be a prominent man.

But what becomes of the English investors? Echo answers. It is a conundrum that goes echoing down the ages, and will only be answered in that period of the next world when everything shall be made plain. The poor widow who put her little pittance in the hands of these sharks doubtless started a private school, if she was qualified for it, or made use of her one accomplishment, painting, music or what not, to earn a miserable existence. The poor clerk who was saving to purchase a home of his own, went back to his lodgings and put his nose freshly upon the grindstone, and the young tradesman went into bankruptcy, his shop passed out of his hands, and he served where he had once commanded. And the shark, if an English one, shelters himself behind his assumed name, or goes to the Continent, and lives in luxury all his days.

Inasmuch as these things have been going on ever since the South Sea bubble it would seem that people would get wiser, and know better than to put their all in such wild-cat schemes. But bear this in mind, the loser never admits that he lost in so stupid a way, and his fellows are never fully informed about it, and besides there are children born every day, a certain percentage of them with sharp teeth, and the rest with fat. The teeth find the fat, the shark finds the gudgeon invariably. That's his business. When I read these prospectuses I find myself getting up a great deal of respect for the old barons who, when they wanted money, seized a rich Jew and starved him awhile in a dungeon, and if that gentle treatment did not suffice to extract the requisite cash, pulled out his teeth, one by one, till he disgorged. In those days a venerable Jew whose teeth were all gone was as fortunate as the man caught by the Indians who was bald and wore a wig--he saved his scalp.

[Sidenote: LONDON QUACKS.]

These ancient robbers did not add grandiloquent lying to theft. It was with them a simple taking of what they wanted without circumlocution. It was highway robbery to picking pockets, and was certainly the preferable of the two.

Were I an Emperor, with absolute power, I should immediately discharge the honest soldier, who would work for a living were he out of the service, and draft in the army all these fellows. And the regiments composed of them should lead every forlorn hope, charge every battery, and do all the dangerous and fatiguing work that soldiers have to do. A country could afford to lose a great many battles to rid itself of these worse than thieves.

Do you remember Dickens' Montagu Tigg in Martin Chuzzlewit? I used to think it an overdrawn picture, but it is not. It is as correct a portrait as was ever limned.

America has been deemed the paradise of the quack, but before England she must pale her ineffectual fires. Next to beer, patent medicines stare you in the face everywhere. The walls fairly shine with the advertisements of remedies for every disease known to the faculty, and when that supply runs out the ingenious proprietor invents a stock of new ailments that never did exist, and inasmuch as the least of them are six syllabled ones, it is to be hoped never will.

There are medicines for the liver, for the kidneys, for the lungs, for the feet, for the head, for the ears, for the eyes, for the scalp, for the hair, and for every part and parcel of the human body, and for every animal that man has subjugated and brought subservient to his will. There are certificates from Lords, and Dukes, and Honorables, as to the efficiency of Hobson's Vermifuge, though with these it is always a tenant's child that was cured, the scions of noble houses being of too blue blood to ever have so vulgar a complaint. In case of gout, or any genuinely aristocratic ailment, they are not so particular.

The advertisement of every remedy ends with the announcement:--

"As there are unprincipled parties in the kingdom who seize upon every article of known merit, to imitate the same, the purchasers of Hobson's remedies are respectfully requested to particularly observe the label on the bottles. The name of "Hobson" is printed on the steel engraving, on the face of the bottle, fourteen hundred and sixty-three times, and without this none are genuine. Beware of fraudulent imitations."

And the British dame will stand at the counter and count the wearying repetition, much to the disgust of the shopman, who, knowing that the remedy is only three days old, and that there are no imitations, and never will be, wants her to take her bottle of the stuff and move on and make room for another victim.

[Sidenote: THE LONDON ADVERTISER.]

Their ingenuity in advertising is as good as that of their trans-Atlantic brethren. You see vast vans driven slowly up and down the streets, built up twenty feet with canvass, showing an emaciated mortal, with scarcely an hour of life in him, with the legend underneath, "Before taking Gobson's Elixir," and the same party dressed, and walking the streets with the physical perfection of a prize fighter, and underneath, "After taking Gobson's Elixir." Transparencies at night flash forth the miraculous virtues of "Hopkins' Saline Draught," and there isn't an inch of dead wall anywhere that has not its burden of announcements. Long processions of ragged men the most of them too old and weak to do anything else, march along the sidewalks sandwiched between two boards, each one bearing testimony to the virtues of some wonderful compound, there being enough of them to weary the eye and make one wish he could go somewhere where advertising was impossible.

One of these human sandwiches remarked to me that the boards were a little uncomfortable in the Summer, but the two made a mighty good overcoat in the Winter.

And as if there was not enough of it already, an enterprising Yankee is here with a steam whale, ninety feet long, spouting water sixty feet high, the machinery and crew concealed in the boat on which it rests, which is to ply up and down the beautiful Thames, bearing upon either side the announcement of a liver pill. The proprietor gives him ten thousand dollars for the use of it for the season, and bears all the expenses of running it. It is very like a whale, and as it attracts much attention will doubtless pay a handsome profit to the man by whom it has been engaged.

The papers are full of such advertising, the only difference between England and America being that the advertisements here are more elegantly written, and couched in really superior English which ours are not, always. The English shoemaker who turns doctor, employs the best literary talent at command to write his announcements, and he pays more liberally than the magazines do the same men. Many a London writer, struggling for fame and a place in literature, makes a handsome addition to his slender income by going into the service of these patent medicine vendors.

Nearly all of them succeed. The British public are a medicine-taking people by nature. There are not many diseases upon the island naturally, but the inhabitants create a very large number by their habits. The universal use of beer--and vile stuff it is--is not conducive to general health, and the Englishman is about the heartiest eater on the globe. He is more than hearty--he verges very closely upon the gluttonous. Consequently he needs medicines, and the manufacturers adapt themselves to the market. There are more than a thousand "after dinner pills," warranted to correct all the effect of "over-indulgence at the table," which means that it will do something toward keeping up a man who eats about four times what he ought to, and drinks enough every year to drive an American or Frenchman into delirium tremens.

The market for these goods is world-wide, and enormous fortunes are amassed. I must say, however, that the trade is not in the best repute. Many brewers have been knighted, but no patent medicine man. In the matter of ennobling people the line must be drawn somewhere. Dickens' barber drew it at the baker--the English draw it at the brewer.