No man, except a common thief, ever started out to promote a mining company or any other company that he was convinced at the outset had no merit; and the work of common thieves is quickly recognized and the offenders are easily apprehended. The more dangerous malefactors are the men in high places who take a good property, overcapitalize it, appraise its value at many times what it is worth, use artful publicity and market methods to beguile the thinking public into believing the stock is worth par or more, and foist it on investors at a figure which robs them of great sums of money. There are more than a million victims of this practice in the United States. After years of experience behind the scenes, the conclusion is forced upon me that the instinct to speculate is so strong in American men and women that they choose to "take a chance" regardless of the fact that at the outset they already half-realize they eventually must lose. Myself, in boyhood, a victim of the instinct to speculate, I, years afterward, at the age of 30, learned to cater to the insatiable desire in others. I spent fortunes for advertising and wrote my own advertisements. I constructed on big lines powerful dollar-making machinery that succeeded in getting the money for my enterprises, and I was generally my own manager. Ten years of hard work in a field in which I labored day and night has disclosed to me that the instinct to gamble is all-conquering among women as well as men--the rich and the poor, the young and the old, the wise and the foolish, the successful and the unsuccessful. Worse, if you have lost some of your hard-earned money in speculation, your case is undoubtedly incurable, because you have a fresh incentive, namely, to "get even." Experience, therefore, will teach you nothing. The professional gambler's aphorism, "You can't kill a sucker," had its genesis in a recognition of this fact, and now stock promoters and manipulators of the multi-millionaire class subscribe to its truth and on it predicate their operations. Nearly everybody speculates (gambles); few win. Where does the money go that is lost? Who gets it? Are you aware that in catering to your instinct to "invest," methods to get you to part with your money are so artfully and deftly applied by the highest that they deceive you completely? Could you imagine it to be a fact that in nearly all cases when you find you are ready to embark on a given speculation, ways and means that are almost scientific in their insidiousness have been used upon you? What are these impalpable yet cunningly devised tricks that are calculated to fool the wisest and which landed YOU? I narrate them herein. What are your chances of winning in any speculation where you play another man's game? HAVE YOU ANY CHANCE AT ALL? In playing the horse races in years past you had only one chance if you persisted--YOU COULD LOSE.