Achieving Prosperity - Ultimate Collection. Thorstein Veblen
get the $200, which I will send you.”
How cunning that is! It is exactly calculated to hit the notions of a vulgar, ignorant, lazy, greedy, and unprincipled bumpkin. Such a fellow would see just far enough into the millstone to be tickled at the idea of cheating those lottery fellows. And the knave ends his letter with one more touch most delicately adapted to make Master Bumpkin feel certain that his cash is coming. He says, “Be sure to show your prize to all your friends, so as to make them buy tickets at my office.”
Moreover, these letters inclose each a “report of the seventeenth monthly drawing of the Cosmopolitan Art Union Association.” You may observe that one of these “seventeenth drawings” took place November 7 1864, and another December 5, 1864; so that seventeenthly came twice. What is a far more remarkable coincidence is this; that in each of these “reports” is a list of a hundred and thirty or forty numbers that drew prizes, and it is exactly the same list each time, and the same prize to each number! There is a third coincidence; that one of these two drawings is said to have been at London, New York, and the other at London, New Jersey. And lastly, there is a fourth coincidence, viz., that neither of these places exists.
Now, what a transparent swindle this is! how plain, how impudent, how rascally! And all done entirely by the use of the Post Office privileges of the United States. Try to catch this fellow. You can find where he mailed his circular; but he probably stopped there over night to do so, and nobody knew it. In each circular, he wrote to his dupes to address him at that new “more central location” that he struggles after so hard; and how is the pursuer to find it? Would anybody naturally go and watch the Post Office at Bronxville, New York, for instance, as a particularly central location for business?
Besides, no one person is cheated out of enough to make him follow up the affair, and probably nobody who sends the cash wants to say much about it afterward. He wants to wait and show the prize!
These dirty sharking traps will always be set, and will always catch silly people, as long as there are any to catch. The only means of stopping such trickery is to diffuse the conviction that the best way to get a living is, to go to work like a man and earn it honestly.
CHAPTER XXII.
ANOTHER LOTTERY HUMBUG.—TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY RECIPES.—VILE BOOKS.—“ADVANTAGE-CARDS.”—A PACKAGE FOR YOU; PLEASE SEND THE MONEY.—PEDDLING IN WESTERN NEW YORK.
The readiness with which people will send off their money to a swindler is perfectly astounding. It does really seem as if an independent fortune could be made simply by putting forth circulars and advertisements, requesting the receiver to send five dollars to the advertiser, and saying that “it will be all right.”
I have already given an account of the way in which lottery dealers operate. From among the same pile of documents which I used then, I have selected a few others, as instances in part, of a class of humbugs sometimes of a kind even far more noxious, and which show that their devisers and patrons are not only sharpers or fools, but often also very cold-blooded villains or very nasty ones. Some of them are managed by printed circulars and written letters, such as those before me; some of them by newspaper advertisements. Some are only to cheat you out of money, and others offer in return for money some base gratification. But whatever means are used, and whatever purpose is sought, they are all alike in one thing—they depend entirely on the monstrous number of simpletons who will send money to people they know nothing about.
Of the nasty ones, I can give no details. Vile books, pictures, etc., are from time to time advertised, sold, and forwarded, by circular, and through the mails, and for large prices.
There have been some cases where a funny sort of swindle has been effected by these peddlers of pruriency, by selling some dirty-minded dupe a cheap good book, at the extravagant price of a dear bad one. More than one foolish youth has received, instead of the vile thing that he sent five dollars for, a nice little New Testament. It is obvious that no very loud complaints are likely to be made about such cheating as that. It is, perhaps, one of the safest swindles ever contrived.
The first document which I take from my pile is the announcement of a fellow who operates lottery-wise. His scheme appeals at once to benevolence and to greediness. He says: “The profits of the distribution are to be given to the Sanitary Commission;” and secondly, “Every ticket brings a prize of at least its full value, and some of them $5,000.”
If, therefore you won’t buy tickets for filthy lucre’s sake, buy for the sake of our soldiers.
“But,” somebody says, “how can you afford this arrangement, which is a direct loss of the whole cost of working your lottery, and moreover of the whole value of all prizes costing more than a ticket?”
“Oh,” replies our benevolent friend, “a number of manufacturers in New England have asked me to do this, and the prizes are given by them as friends of the soldier.”
One observation will sufficiently show what an impudent mess of lies this story is, namely;—If the manufacturers of New England wanted to give money to the Sanitary Commission, they would give money; if goods, they would give goods. They certainly would not put their gifts through the additional roundabout, useless nonsense of a lottery, which is to turn over only the same amount of funds to the Commission.
The next document is a circular sent from a Western town by a fellow who claims also to be a master of arts, doctor of medicines, and doctor of laws, but whose handwriting and language are those of a stable-boy. This chap sends round a list of two hundred and fifty recipes at various prices, from twenty-five cents to a dollar each. Send him the money for any you wish, and he promises to return you the directions for making the stuff. You are then to go about and peddle it, and swiftly become independently rich. You can begin with a dollar, he says; in two days make fifty dollars, and then sweep on in a grand career of affluence, making from $75 to $200 a day, “if you are industrious.” What is petroleum to this? It is a mercy that we don’t all turn to and peddle to each other; we should all get too rich to speak!
The fellow, out of pure kindness and desire for your good, recommends you to buy all his recipes, as then you will be sure to sell something to everybody. Most of these recipes are for sufficiently harmless purposes—shaving-soap, cement, inks—“five gallons of good ink for fifteen cents”—tooth-powders, etc. Some of them are arrant nonsense; such as “tea—better than the Chinese,” which is as if he promised something wetter than water; “to make thieves’ vinegar;” “prismatic diamond crystals for windows;” “to make yellow butter”—is the butter blue where the man lives? Others are of a sort calculated to attract foolish rustic rascals who would like to gain an easy living by cheating, if they were only smart enough. Thus, there is “Rothschild’s great secret; or how to make common gold.” My readers shall have a better recipe than this swindler’s—work hard, think hard, be honest, and spend little—this will “make common gold,” and this is all the secret Rothschild ever had. A number of these recipes are barefaced quackeries; such as cures for consumption, cancer, rheumatism, and sundry other diseases; to make whiskers and mustaches grow—ah, boys, you can’t hurry up those things. Greasing your cheeks is just as good as trying to whistle the hair out, but not a bit better. Don’t hurry; you will be old quite soon enough! But this fellow is ready for old fools as well young ones, for he has recipes for curing baldness and removing wrinkles. And last, but not least, quietly inserted among all these fooleries and harmless humbugs, are two or three recipes which promise the safe gratification of the basest vices. Those are what he really hoped to get money for.
I have carefully refrained from giving any names or information which would enable anybody to address any of these folks. I do not propose to cooperate with them, if I know it.
The next is a circular only to be very briefly alluded to: it promises to furnish, on receipt of the price, and “by mail or express, with perfect safety, so as to defy detection,” any of twenty-two wholly infamous books, and various other cards and commodities, well suited to the public of Sodom and