less to-day to counterfeit and
steal.

TO PENITENCE: that in the minds of all who read this eventful history
there may grow up a knowledge and a conviction that the gaining of vast
wealth is not worth the sacrifice of manhood, and that poverty and
abstinence with honor are better worth having than millions and luxury
at the cost of candor and rectitude.

TO MY AUDIENCE

SAINTS, SINNERS, AND IN-BETWEENS

Before you enter the confines of "Frenzied Finance," here spread
out--for your inspection, at least; enlightenment, perhaps--halt one
brief moment. If the men and things to be encountered within are
real--did live or live now--you must deal with them one way. If these
embodiments are but figments of my mind and pen, you must regard them
from a different view-point. Therefore, before turning the page, it
behooves you to find for yourself an answer to the grave question:

Is it the truth that is dealt with here? In weighing the evidence
remember:

My profession is business. My writing is an incident. "Frenzied Finance"
was set down during the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth hours of busy
days. I pass it up as the history of affairs of which I was a part. The
men who move within the book's pages are still on the turf. A period of
twelve years is covered. So far, eighteen instalments, in all some
400,000 words, have been published. The spigot is still running. I have
written from memory, necessarily. While it is true that fiction is
expressed in the same forms and phrases as truth, no man ever lived who
could shape 400,000 words into the kinds of pictures I have painted and
pass them off for aught but what they were. The character of my palette
made it mechanically impossible to shade or temper the pigments, for the
story was written in instalments, and circumstances were such that often
one month's issue was out to the public before the next instalment was
on paper. Considering all this, the consistency of the chronicle as it
stands is the best evidence of its truth. In submitting it to my readers
I desire to reiterate:

It _is_ truth--of the kind that carries its own bell and candle. Within
the narrative itself are the reagents required to test and prove its
genuineness. Were man endowed with the propensity of a Muenchhausen, the
cunning of a Machiavelli, the imagination of Scheherezade, the ability
of a Shakespeare, and the hellishness of his Satanic Majesty, he could
not play upon 400,000 words, or one-qua