e at one end--that actually these fellows had a hundred thousand
dollars in bank within ten weeks--before they owned one foot of land, or
one inch of well, or one drop of oil, except those three pints in the
vials on the office shelf!

And remember this is no imaginary case. I am giving point by point the
exact transactions of a real Petroleum Company.

Everything I have told was done, only if possible with a more false and
baseless impudence than I have described. And scores and scores of other
Petroleum Companies have been organized in ways exactly as unprincipled.
Some of them may perhaps have proceeded as real business concerns. Some
have stopped and disappeared as soon as the managers could get a
handsome sum of money into their pockets for stock.

What the result will be, in the present case, I don't know. The New York
and Rangoon Petroleum Company, when I last knew about it, "still lived."
They had--or said they had--bought some land. I have not heard of their
receiving any oil raised from their own wells. They have sent off a
monstrous quantity of circulars, prospectuses and advertisements. They
caused a portrait and biography of the Honorable A. Bee to be printed in
a very respectable periodical, and paid five hundred dollars for it.
They had themselves systematically puffed up to the seventh heaven in a
long series of articles in another periodical, and paid the owner of it
$2,000 or so _in stock_. They talk very big about a dividend. But
although they have received a great deal of money, and paid out a great
deal, I do not know of their paying their stockholders any yet. If they
should, it would not prove much. For it is sometimes considered "a good
dodge" to declare and pay a large dividend before any real profits have
been earned; as this is calculated to enhance the price of shares, and
to make them "go off like hot cakes."

I shall not make any "moral" about this story. It teaches its own. It is
a very mild statement of what was done to establish an actual
specimen,--and far from being of the worst description--of a great part
of the Petroleum Company enterprises of the day.

It is whispered that somehow or other the trustees and officers of the
New York and Rangoon do not own so much stock of their company as they
did, having managed to have their stock sold to subscribers as if it
were company stock. If this is so, those gentlemen have made their
reward sure; and Mr. Peter Rolleum, having the cash i