My Adventures with Your Money

You are a member of a race of gamblers. The instinct to speculate dominates you. You feel that you simply must take a chance. You can't win, yet you are going to speculate and to continue to speculate—and to lose. Lotteries, faro, roulette, and horse-race betting being illegal, you play the stock game. In the stock game the cards (quotations or market fluctuations) are shuffled and riffled and STACKED behind your back, AFTER the dealer (the manipulator) knows on what side you have placed your bet, and you haven't got a chance. When you and your brother gamblers are long of stocks in thinly margined accounts with brokers, the market is manipulated down, and when you are short of them, the prices are manipulated up. You are on guard against the Get-Rich-Quick man, and you flatter yourself that you can detect his wiles at a glance. You can—one kind of Get-Rich-Quick operator. But not the dangerous kind. Modern Get-Rich-Quick Finance is insidious and unfrenzied. It is practised by the highest, and you are probably one of its easy victims. One class of Get-Rich-Quick operator uses crude methods, has little standing in the community, operates with comparatively small capital, and caters to those who do not think and have only small resources. He is not particularly dangerous. The other uses scientific methods—so scientific, indeed, that only men "on the inside" readily recognize them; occupies a pedestal in the community; is generally a man of excellent financial standing, a member of a stock exchange; employs large capital; appeals to thinkers or those who flatter themselves that they know the difference between a gold bar and a gold brick, and seeks to separate from their money all classes and conditions of men and women with accumulations large or small. The United States Government during the past few years, at the behest of the big fellow, who seeks a monopoly of the game, has been raiding the little fellow—the crude operator whose power to injure is as nothing compared to the ravages that have been wrought by the activities of his really formidable prototype.