Part 8

19. Try to keep your mind clean--evil and success will not mix.

20. If responsibility confronts you, seize it. Do not throw it aside--responsibility represents opportunity.

Some of these sayings will strike you as very old and lacking in novelty. But, old as these rules are, human beings have not yet learned to follow them. And they won't learn for many a long year.

We shall not moralize about them all today, only one or two we want to emphasize.

"Nothing is troublesome that we do willingly."

If you work willingly, if you make yourself realize that willing effort is easy, AND THE ONLY KIND THAT MAKES YOU GROW AND SUCCEED, you will solve one of your big working problems.

Did you ever see a small boy walking ahead of a band, with the music playing?

And did you ever see the same small boy walking half the distance to get a newspaper for his father? Walking with the band rests him; it doesn't tire him at all, BECAUSE HE DOES IT WILLINGLY. And the other kind of walking takes the very heart out of him and makes him almost too tired to eat his dinner.

It is exactly that way with all the work we do in this world. When you do things willingly, with the heart and the nerves and the brain acting with one another cheerfully, work is easy AND SUCCESS FOLLOWS.

A willing FOOL may lag behind an unwilling man of intelligence. But even a willing fool is happier in the end than an unwilling one, and, all things being even, the employe working WILLINGLY will cease being an employe and have others working for him sooner than the other man.

PRIDE COSTS MORE THAN HUNGER, THIRST AND COLD.

This applies to all kinds of foolish vanity. It applies to the young man who never does anything, BECAUSE HE IS TOO PROUD TO DO WHAT HE HAS THE CHANCE TO DO.

It applies to men and women who squander on dress and show the money that they need for more serious purposes.

It applies to those that in old age have no money saved up, BECAUSE PRIDE SPENT THEIR MONEY AS FAST AS THEY GOT IT.

The pride that keeps men honest, the pride that makes men truthful, never kept a man back or hurt him.

The bad kind of pride is the pride which can be described as "the coward's pride." Men are foolishly and cowardly proud BECAUSE THEY ARE AFRAID OF WHAT OTHER MEN WILL THINK. Money that they cannot afford they spend helping other men to drink too much, BECAUSE THEY ARE ASHAMED TO BE THOUGHT STINGY OR MEAN.

Men squander in keeping up appearances money that should be saved for another day, for a good business opportunity, because they are too cowardly to be guided by their own judgment, and ignore what others may THINK about them.

Self-respect is one thing; foolish pride, vanity, moral cowardice, are very different. Get rid of them.

All the advice from these 20 rules is good advice. The man who can keep his temper while he thinks--whether he count ten or a million--is a lucky man.

A man in a rage is a man whose BRAIN IS NO LONGER WORKING. And the man whose brain isn't working is at the mercy of the man whose brain IS working.

Worry about the FUTURE troubles is a curse with many men. It prevents their working well TODAY.

Overeating, and especially eating at the wrong time, is a great evil in this country. If men would learn to eat heartily only when their day's work is done, WHEN THEIR MINDS MUST NO LONGER BE CONCENTRATED, THEY WILL SAVE THEIR STOMACHS AND ACCOMPLISH TWICE THE AMOUNT OF WORK IN THEIR LIVES.

Read these rules over, and moralize on them for yourselves and for your children.

COINING CUPID'S WILES.

How Matrimonial Agencies Prey on the Public--Their Degeneration Into the Worst Forms of Crime.

$1,000,000 Secured by These Get-Rich-Quick Schemers Discovered by Detective Clifton R. Wooldridge, Chicago's Famous Police Detective.

125 matrimonial agencies in Chicago raided and closed in the last five years.

4,500,000 matrimonial letters seized and destroyed.

1,500,000 matrimonial agencies' stock letters seized and destroyed.

1,400,000 matrimonial stock photographs seized and destroyed.

500,000 photographs sent to the matrimonial agencies by men and women who were seeking their affinities seized and destroyed.

40 wagon loads of matrimonial literature seized and destroyed.

One of the most insidious forms of crime is the Matrimonial Agency. Seemingly harmless, or at most merely foolish, is the Matrimonial Agency at its inception.

But step by step within the past few years we have seen the Matrimonial Agency turned into a volcano belching forth fraud, swindling, bigamy, desertion, and finally ghastly wholesale murder.

We have seen the Matrimonial Agency sweep the whole range of the world of crime from the petty thieving of a Carson to the almost unbelievable horrors of the Gunness Farm.

And this monster is hydra-headed. Stamp it out in one place and it immediately reappears in another. Send a "manager" to prison once, twice, ten times, and the minute the prison doors are open he is back at the old stand doing business.

Something of the tremendous efforts being put forth to stamp out this evil may be gained from the headlines of this story, where the strenuous work of Detective Wooldridge of Chicago is summarized.

Chicago has been and is today infested by a formidable community of matrimonial agencies who invade all ranks of life. They promote many specious schemes to lure the elusive dollar from the pockets of unwary victims. These operatives are sharp, smooth and unscrupulous--the most dangerous of criminal perverts.

Were the census enumerators of the United States to compile a list of the "sucker" public the gullible ones would aggregate tens of millions. There is not a township in this great nation that does not contain its portion of confiding persons who are ready to believe anything, from the rankest catch-penny advertisement to a fallacy in theological dogma.

They are willing to open up their hearts to unknown matrimonially inclined correspondents; to accept as gospel the incredible statements of impostors and to pay out money gained by hard toil for something which the reason of a child should tell them it is beyond the power of man to provide.

They are easy prey alike to religious and political impostors and unscrupulous adventurers. Investigations for years past into the innermost secrets of swindlers, and the observations incidental to official experience disclosing how victims are drawn into the net of the grafter, impel the belief that the faith of many persons passes beyond the bounds of credulity into the domain of imbecility.

Men and women who are engaged in promoting matrimonial agencies are guilty of crime. It is opposed to the fundamental principles of society. Such a practice should under no circumstances be tolerated. It is inconsistent with the highest ideals of what should constitute the proper marriage relations.

HUMAN DERELICTS ARE DUPES.

Human derelicts of a low mental caliber are the dupes of these matrimonial agencies. Few people know that such schemes as these are carried out. Few know that advertisements by men of wealth, women of culture and pretty widows who seek matrimonial alliances are merely means by which scoundrels get a revenue.

MATRIMONIAL AGENTS' METHODS.

To describe adequately the technicalities of the marriage agencies and bureau swindlers' methods would be impossible without presenting actual copies of documents necessary to the system. Early in the investigations the discovery was made that the scores of matrimonial agencies, "introduction bureaux" and "marriage clubs" were using practically the same literature. Few departed from the stereotyped plan for "pulling the suckers on." For the most part the prospectuses and "follow-up" letters were identical.

As often happened, however, when a victim was "landed right" and ventured to Chicago from his distant rural retreat prepared to carry out in earnest the game that had been worked upon him in a spirit of mercenary recklessness, the methods of handling him were varied in respect to both finesse and effectiveness.

Any person familiar with the uses of the typewriter easily could have discovered that the "personal" letters received from time to time were nothing more than circulars printed by the thousands. So vast was the number of the gullible that seldom, if ever, was an actual, bona fide letter sent in reply to those from the victims.

Space was left at the top of the stock letters for the insertion of the name of the person to whom it was sent. In their haste the swindlers often begrudged the time necessary to change the "Dear Sir" to "Dear Miss" or "Dear Madam" when a woman was addressed on stationery intended for male clients.

NO TRUST HERE.

The general uniformity of the literature was at first thought by me to indicate that the matrimonial agencies were banded together in a gigantic trust. But later I learned that as they increased in number the newcomers exhibited conscienceless audacity in copying the forms used by their predecessors. It was also found in some cases several matrimonial agencies were operated from one address and one or two men, or a man and his wife would represent half a dozen concerns by changing names and locations every thirty or sixty days. Because of these facts and the added fact that whoever compiled the original forms from which the others copied, realized, he was in an illegitimate business, the plagiarists were never prosecuted. Thus the buncombe administered to the suckers became uniform in phraseology.

If a person desired to make assurance doubly sure for gaining wealth and marital bliss and he applied to several agencies at the same time, the same mail would bring him letters from each matrimonial agency with which he communicated, worded identically. They would be mimeograph copies, and the only difference in their appearance would be in the printed heading indicating the name of the agency. The name of the recipient would often be written at the top in ink different in color from the body of the letter.

WORKING THE DOUBLE CROSS.

The usual beginning is a small subscription fee paid for a "matrimonial" paper. This paper contains alleged descriptions of men and women, principally the latter, who are claimed by the publisher to be seeking wives or husbands through the matrimonial agency. The subscriber who becomes interested in any of the descriptions is made to pay a fee for more detailed information and alleged record of the financial circumstances of the person. There is sometimes an additional fee for a photograph. This picture may or may not be one of the person described, but that matters little. Almost any old photograph will serve the purpose. In all the raids made on matrimonial agencies collections of photographs have been found.

That tens of thousands of otherwise intelligent men and women should either entrust pictures of themselves to an agency by which it is to be sent out to unknown persons, or should even begin such negotiations as those carried on through the matrimonial agency, is incomprehensible.

The money derived in the aggregate from subscriptions to the matrimonial paper, the fees for particulars and those for photographs and miscellaneous "services" amount to large sums. With many of the agencies the services stop at this point, but many others undertake personal introductions of lonesome maids and widows to the invariably "honest and affectionate" bachelors and widowers, and when this is done there are other fees, depending altogether on how much the victims appear to be willing to stand.

A large number have been found and suppressed in which there was but one lonesome maid or widow and one honest and affectionate bachelor or widower, the former being the woman accomplice of the manager of the agency and the latter the manager himself. They answer love-lorn correspondents of both sexes and select for victims those believed to have the most money. If the assistant to the manager is posing as the possible bride in the case the wife hunter must make satisfactory settlements with the manager for conducting the negotiations, and this amount, with that which the accomplice is able to secure from the victim, amounts often to a considerable sum. After the victim is separated from his money something happens to prevent the happy conclusion of the marriage negotiations.

TWO WELL-DEFINED FORMS.

There are two well-defined forms of the "matrimonial agent." The one is the man who openly runs an agency, who advertises "golden-haired young ladies, worth half a million dollars," "blue-eyed widows of languishing temperaments" and "wealthy farmers." It is through this class of "bureau" that the great crimes of the matrimonial business have been engineered. Hoch, Mrs. Gunness, Holmes and other arch-criminals made good use of this type.

The other type is just the plain swindler. The man who works along the secondary lines, as they may be called, would scorn to be a matrimonial agent. He is either a reverend gentleman of the cloth, a minister to whom some languishing widow is looking for spiritual direction, and he thinks that she "needs she should get married," to quote the East Side phraseology; or he is a lawyer who has a wealthy client, who, not being a business woman, is incapable of running her own affairs, and he again thinks of marriage as a solution; or, again, he is "an employment agency." This secondary type is generally a cheap sort, grafting on the gullible for five or ten dollars, or even as high as $100.

CONCRETE EXAMPLES.

TYPE NO. 1.

September 8, 1905, John H. Harris, 168 Hamlin avenue, editor and publisher of The Pilot, a marriage agency paper, and manager of a cheap mail order house, was raided and arrested by Detective Wooldridge.

Among the letters seized were complaints from his patrons. They received no returns for money paid him, and averred his paper was being used to blackmail men and women. Complaints were also made that many of the names which appeared in the paper were not authorized, and other names attached to the order were forgeries.

The following is the copy of a letter dated September 1, 1906, and is only one among hundreds of others sent out by the thousands by Harris. Many more thousands were sent through the mail to his sub-agents, who worked on a commission. This agent employed other agents, who started an endless chain by copying the letter and having the friends do likewise.

Chicago. Ill., Sept. 1, 1905.

Dear Sir:

We have a very recent application from a brown-eyed widow of 41, medium size, musical, has no children. She informs us that she has recently come into possession of a fortune of over FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS, and that she wishes to marry an honest, affectionate gentleman. We also have a recent application from a pretty, blue-eyed lady of 20, who estimates her present means at FORTY THOUSAND DOLLARS, and her inheritance at twenty thousand dollars. Her form is graceful, her education good, her disposition gentle and she desires a steady, honest husband. We believe she would start her husband in business. And to accommodate those ladies and quickly find a husband for them we make the following SPECIAL OFFER:

Fill out the coupon at the bottom, and send it to us with one dollar (and six postage stamps) and enclose a sealed and stamped letter to either or both of the ladies referred to above. We will immediately mail your letter to the lady or ladies, and place your name on our books, and send you a certificate of membership for six months, and send you the full names and addresses of the handsome widow of means, and the handsome blue-eyed maiden of means, and also send you a list of names and addresses of other ladies of means and otherwise. And until you are married, or until the end of six months, we will, on or about the first of each month, mail you a list of descriptions, names and addresses of ladies of means and otherwise, without application from you or any expense to you. We have good reason to believe that either of the ladies mentioned above would make you a good wife, but if they do not meet your approval you can select one who will from the stream of ladies of means and otherwise who are constantly requesting us to secure husbands for them, which enables us to introduce you to those whom you would be pleased to meet with a view to marriage.

Faithfully yours, JOHN H. HARRIS. _Pub. of The Pilot._

JOHN H. HARRIS, Chicago, Ill.

Dear Sir:

I herewith enclose $1.12 as full payment on the above offer.

Name---- Postoffice----

Street, or Box No---- State----

United States Inspector of Mails at Chicago Postoffice R. W. McAfee compelled John H. Harris to furnish him with the names and addresses of the two women heiresses who were worth $40,000 and $500,000, respectively, who were just dying for the want of a good, kind husband to spend their money for them, and were seeking marriage through his paper and matrimonial agency.

Harris gave the name of Mrs. H. R. Adams, at Huntington, Md., as the $40,000 woman and Jennie Ziehler, Lawrence, Mass., as the $500,000 woman. Upon investigation it was found that neither of the women was worth a dollar. The $500,000 woman was in the insane asylum.

This letter, together with The Pilot, marriage paper and its printed advertisements, was plainly intended to draw the unwary and deprive the ignorant of their savings.

John H. Harris then appealed to ex-Mayor Edward F. Dunne of Chicago, under the alias of A. Ingird, taxpayer, citizen and reputable business man, to have Detective Wooldridge stopped from further interfering with him or his business. Men who operate these frauds pretend to be honest and high-minded; by constant practice of their wiles upon others they develop self-deception and come to believe in their own honesty to such an extent that when questioned they assume a good counterfeit of honest indignation.

Mayor Dunne upon investigation learned the large mass of evidence gathered, and ordered the investigation to go forward, which, resulted in the arrest and holding over of John H. Harris to the Grand Jury.

COMMITS SUICIDE.

These complaints and evidence were turned over to Colonel James Stuart, Chief Inspector of the Mails at the Chicago Postoffice, for further investigation. A fraud order was requested. On August 18, 1907, Mr. Harris committed suicide by blowing out his brains at 168 N. Hamlin avenue, Chicago, Illinois, after the mask had been pulled off and his methods exposed.

One is unable to state whether John H. Harris is opening a mail order house, paper and marriage agency in the other world. When he left he did not leave word where he would make his next stop, but if he went to the other world, we are not informed that wireless telegraph or balloon companies have as yet perfected the lines of transportation or communication.

Harris is a fairly representative and concrete expression of the regulation matrimonial agent. It was through such agencies as his that the great crimes eventually were pulled off.

SECONDARY TYPES.

But in the following letters we have an excellent example of the second type, the little grafter who wants anything you can give, from $5 to $100. From the text of the letters it will be observed that this man was operating as a minister, a lawyer and an employment agency at one and the same time, as the letters are all from one source.

In the case of the lawyer this scoundrel was trading upon the name of Edward H. Morris, one of the foremost colored attorneys of the United States, a man universally respected and admired by men in all walks of life. When the fact of this trading on his name was brought to the real attorney's attention he was furious, and he cheerfully gave all the assistance in his power to Detective Wooldridge.

This smooth one was afterward arrested in New Orleans, convicted and sent to prison for a term.

Here follows the text of the letters:

MATRIMONIAL AGENCIES' STOCK LETTERS UNDER THE GUISE OF MINISTRY.

REV. JOSEPH SPENCER, 80 Madison Street. Manager of American Book Concern. Dealer in Religious Books.

Chicago, Ill., July 26, 1905.

MR. O. W. ZINK, Marshall, Mo.

Dear Sir:

For many years I have been a MINISTER of the GOSPEL and during that time I have not only performed hundreds of marriages, but have arranged many, and there are at the present time among my acquaintances some half dozen wealthy ladies, ranging in age from twenty to forty or fifty years, one of whom is the handsome widow whose photo I enclose herewith.

She is worth, in actual cash and negotiable securities, fully $50,000, inherited from her worthy husband, who departed this life a year ago and, as she is without friends, relatives or children, her physician, a friend of mine, has on account of her utter loneliness advised her to marry, believing that marriage and change of scene will prove for her a blessing in disguise, and naturally she has turned to me, her spiritual adviser, in whom she has the utmost confidence. I have several times talked the matter over with her, and, knowing that she is very much averse to advertising, I have undertaken to introduce to her some gentleman who would make her a good husband, and to arrange a marriage for her.

As her physician thinks it advisable for her to reside elsewhere than Chicago, I have been somewhat perplexed as to how to secure for her a suitable introduction and in my dilemma consulted a matrimonial agency and, after several conferences with them, I have decided to submit for your kind consideration my proposition and manner of procedure. I have studied the matter carefully, have gone thoroughly into your description and instructions as filed with the agency of which you are a member, and in my mind there is not the slightest doubt as to you two proving mutually suitable to each other. Of course, you cannot form the proper idea of her from the small photo enclosed, but in age, appearance, circumstances, etc., she is just what you have been seeking in a wife.

She is in every respect a thoroughly good woman, unusually bright and intelligent, but knows nothing of business, and is in absolute need of a husband to look after her affairs, but, TO BE CANDID WITH YOU, I am getting along in years, and have a large family to support and as I only arrange a few marriages at intervals, I must necessarily have compensation adequate to the service I render.

Now, I can, by recommending you personally, cause her to enter into a correspondence with you that will undoubtedly lead to your marriage, if you are still desirous of such a marriage, as I presume you are, from the fact that you are registered with a matrimonial agency. I will, for the consideration of $100, introduce you to her by letter and after you have exchanged three or four letters, will have you visit her at her expense, as you may mutually agree, if you will follow my simple instructions.