Who ever does?
My "daily letters" had now ceased to be advertisements, had become news,
sought by all the newspapers of this country and of the big cities in Great
Britain. I could have made a large saving by no longer paying my sixty-odd
regular papers for inserting them. But I was looking too far ahead to
blunder into that fatal mistake. Instead, I signed a year's contract
with each of my papers, they guaranteeing to print my advertisements, I
guaranteeing to protect them against loss on libel suits. I organized
a dummy news bureau, and through it got contracts with the telegraph
companies. Thus insured against the cutting of my communications with the
public, I was ready for the real campaign.
It began with my "History of the National Coal Company." I need not repeat
that famous history here. I need recall only the main points--how I proved
that the common stock was actually worth less than two dollars a share,
that the bonds were worth less than twenty-five dollars in the hundred,
that both stock and bonds were illegal; my detailed recital of the crimes
of Roebuck, Melville and Langdon in wrecking mining properties, in wrecking
coal railways, in ejecting American labor and substituting helots from
eastern Europe; how they had swindled and lied and bribed; how they had
twisted the books of the companies, how they were planning to unload the
mass of almost worthless securities at high prices, then to get from under
the market and let the bonds and stocks drop down to where they could buy
them in on terms that would yield them more than two hundred and fifty per
cent, on the actual capital invested.
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