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Show vainly tried to interest financiers in his great invention, which in later years netted him the princely income of $4,000 a day, had to pawn his model and patent papers for money to pay his passage back to New York. Notwithstanding that most of the great fortunes of this coun-try, coun-try, like those of Rockefeller and Carnegie, have been made through industrial inventions anddiscoverics which accomplish today in one hour what took ten to effect yesterday, the hole in the ground still appears to be the fetish of untold thousands. Realizing this, it i3 hard to understand the continued fascination which year in and year out prompts men and women to give up their hard earned savings sav-ings to the greedy horde of schemers whose only asset is generally an unexplored cavern in some mountainside and the hope that one day it may produce a profit to those who foolishly put their money into it a prospect which rarely eventuates. SHEARING THE LAMBS. Chief Postofficc Inspector Warren Dickson is authority or the . statement that $5,000,000 is lost annually in this country in spurious mining ventures. With the imposing record of frauds practiced in the name of i high finance to fortify them against temptation, it is incredible that so many continue to fall a prey to the snare of the mining shark with his blind trail of treasure in some faraway hole in the ground 'and his lurid tale of millions waiting to fatten hungry pocketbooks. Aside from the sense of improvidence which it reflects there is in - , the large support commanded from the public by wildcat mining pro-I pro-I ; motions what must seem to students of political enocomy a strange 1 anachronism. I ; While the booster of such properties appears to have little or no trouble in loosening the purse strings of investors, the anomalous j ; . spectacle is presented of James J. Hill, builder of the Great North- t , em railroad; Arthur E. Stillwell, constructor of the Kansas City, - , Mexico & Orient railroad, and other creators of the country's wealth, ; , bemg forced to go abroad to secure money with which to extend i their roads. s The popular tendency to ignore practical enterprises in order , to give chase to some ignis fatuus of fortune is an old story, empha- j j sized so often in the beginning of what afterwards became the na tion s greatest and most prosperous industries that one instinctive-j- , ly recalls that famous aphorism of the late P. T. Barnum that "a j new fool is born every minute." Samuel F. B. Morse almost starved j to dea.th while waiting for recognition for his telegraph, one of the greatest money making institutions that the world has ever known Elias Howe, inventor of the sewing machine, sustained himself, his "ife and his three children on crusts of bread in London while he i; I ! |