In the meanwhile, the Emma mine promotion was brought out with a grand blare of trumpets. Immense sums were spent in wholesale advertising. The most dazzling and seductive literature was scattered broadcast through the length and breadth of the United Kingdom. Its fabulous wealth was described in the vivid language that fires the speculative spirit latent in every man and in most women. Special stress was laid on the eminent station of the American backers. I have seen much lurid get-rich-quick literature of our own, at a time when the industry of plucking the public was unchecked and in full bloom, but nothing that took rank with the effrontery employed to bolster up this brazen fraud. Of course, the promotion was a huge success. When the subscription books were opened a small river of gold poured in from applicants for shares. The issue was enormously over-subscribed. Baron Grant and his associates selected, as far as possible, the smaller class of investors. These are less able to roar in an effective manner when the inevitable day of reckoning comes for every crooked deal. The Emma mine was regularly listed on the London stock exchange, alongside of reputable and conservative companies. It became the feature of a tremendous gamble. In the hands of expert market manipulators, the stock ebbed and flowed like the tide. Stories of fabulous dividends were passed from mouth to mouth and the stock soared from one high level to another till ten pound shares touched thirty-two pounds. This absolutely valueless and exhausted property had a paper value of $16,000,000. When it shrank under profit taking and selling pressure, reports of new strikes, vast ore bodies uncovered, sent the prices booming once more. Had it not been for the utter heartlessness of the thing, one could almost admire the skill with which a huge deception was organized and kept alive. Of course, I shouted “murder” from the housetops. I publicly denounced the Emma mine as an exhausted, worthless hole in the ground. It was like a voice raised in the wilderness. No one paid the least attention to my warnings in the midst of the bawling crowd. I was classified either as a general calamity howler or as the leader of a “bear” faction, anxious to organize a “bear” raid and interrupt the wave of prosperity. At length, to gain a larger audience and put my statements in responsible form, I made an effort in a new field of endeavor by founding the London Stock Exchange Review. CHAPTER XXV. INSPIRED BY DESIRE TO EXPOSE EMMA MINE SWINDLE AUTHOR BEGINS PUBLICATION OF FINANCIAL JOURNAL. _Ralston Reports Discovery of Immense Diamond Field and Declares His Find is Worth $50,000,000._