We offer these helpless ones freely as victims to the greater
cunning and strength of men wholly without sense of business
honor or personal decency. When we do this, we also attack the
whole system of savings banks, which is, or should be, the very
bulwark of a nation's financial safety. Says the wolf to the
widow, to the busy professional man, to the clerk, the
stenographer, the wage earner: "Take your money out of the
savings bank. What is three per cent. a year, when I can make you
three hundred per cent. a year? Give your money to me!" We permit
that. Our national government does not undertake to put a stop to
it; our states do not undertake to do so; and this fact is more
possible through actual lack of proper statutes than through any
misinterpretation or lack of enforcement of the law.

The field is one devised by nature for the trickster. His success
does not depend altogether on human gullibility; part of his
argument rests on the conditions which surround the industry of
mining, one which never can be free of extreme risk. All men know
that gold is found far away, where living is high and means of
transportation are scarce; that it costs large sums to find and
dig it, and that such sums are more easily raised among the many
than among the few. None of these attending features has weight
to stop the capitalization of bona-fide enterprises. These latter
are used as bait by men who have nothing bona-fide to offer, and
who make their fattest profits out of their shallowest shafts.


THE "SUCKER LIST" IN WALL STREET