Originally the dealers in valueless securities did not take the trouble to purchase any properties but merely sold their stock and decamped with the proceeds. Of course such conduct was most ill- advised and unnecessary. It was obviously criminal to sell stock in a concern that has no existence, and several of my clients having been convicted of grand larceny, for this reason I took it upon myself to advise the others actually to purchase lands, mines, or other property and issue their stock against it. In this way their business became absolutely legitimate--as strictly honest and within the law as any of the stock-jobbing concerns of the financial district. To be sure, the mine need not be more than the mere beginning of a shaft, if even that; the oil-well might have ceased to flow; the timber land might be only an acre or so in extent; but at any rate they existed. Their value was immaterial, since the intending purchaser was not informed in the advertisement as to the amount of gold, silver, or copper mined in any specific period, the number of gallons of oil per minute that flowed from the well, or the precise locality of the timber forests, but merely as to the glorious future in store for all who subscribed for the stock. This vital distinction has always existed in civil as well as criminal law between what is fraud and what is legitimate encouragement to the buyer. To tell the prospective vendee of your old gray mare that she is the finest horse in the county is not fraud even if she is the veriest scarecrow, for it merely represents your opinion --perhaps colored in part by your desire to sell--and is not a matter of demonstrable fact. To assure him, however, that she has never run away, had blind staggers, or spring halt, when these assertions are not true, is "a false statement as to a past or existing fact," and as such constitutes a fraud--if he buys your horse. Now, it frequently has happened in my experience that gentlemen desiring to find purchasers for securities or property of little value have so carelessly mingled statements of fact with opinions, laudations, and prophecies as to their goods, that juries have said that they were guilty of fraud in so doing. Thus the lawyer becomes at every turn indispensable to the business man. The following circular was drawn up for one of our clients and is an excellent example of a perfectly harmless and legal advertisement that might easily become fraudulent. We will suppose that the corporation owned one-quarter of an acre of wood lot about ten miles from a region where copper was being mined.