perior to one's fellows: "little children stumbling in the dark." Democracy is the negation of these foibles. Democracy is a wholesome, virile, honest and sublime philosophy of faith in one's fellow-creatures. It says that mankind holds more of good than of evil, more of homely wisdom than of empty folly, more of trust than of suspicion and less hatred than love. The spring of democracy is not the laboratory and its vindication is not in scientific criticism; democracy is founded upon faith, and its roots spring not from the brain but from the heart. Such also is the source of patriotism. Reason does not tell one to love one's country, but affection. It is not because my country is great, powerful, rich, wise or fertile that I love her, any more than I weighed in my mind the virtues and accomplishments of my parents and brothers before yielding up to them my affection. Our parents and our country we love as the sources of our lives, the protectors of our infancy, and because around them cling our tenderest memories and associations. And so faith is a characteristic of your true soldier and is the source from which his ideas of loyalty and devotion to duty spring.

Of the qualities which go toward the making of a real soldier, courage is native to man, is strengthened by civilization and supported and coordinated by discipline. Obedience is an element of discipline designed to secure this coordination. Patriotism, like courage, has its source in the human heart; it is developed by the processes of education and should be given conscious direction by discipline. The sentiments of loy

alty and honor, too, often come into the Army with the recruit, but require direction into the proper channels; this is best secured through the practice of justice and an appeal to the intelligence. These are the essential qualities of a soldier; drill, save as a means of rendering masses flexible to the will of the leader, is chiefly useful as a means toward discipline by developing the qualities of instant obedience, thoroughness and precision. It assists the formation of such automatic habits as are designed to counteract the confusing influences of battle and the yielding to disastrous instincts.

The development of intelligence and judgment, together with tactical instruction formerly the province of officers only, have now become desirable attri butes of all ranks, but have not the basic value of the other qualities. Without them a man may still be a soldier; with them, but lacking the former, he may not.

Unfortunately our emphasis has been almost entirely misplaced. Therefore we fought a war with gallant and intelligent men instead of with gallant soldiers. It was therefore more bloody, more creditable to our hearts than to our intelligence; it brought glory, but little honor. Glory is an inferior and more expensive article. It was therefore bad business.

Whether in war or peace, a true soldier is worth making; a true soldier is a menace, not to his country's ideals, but a menace to militarism. History can tell us how to make true soldiers. We should consult her before we try to make any more.

TH

IME was when the confidence man would slip some stage money or brass jewelry into his wallet and adjourn to the Union Station in full assurance that some train was bearing cityward an honest agriculturist with a craving for adventure and a day off. No statistican has ever been able to give sufficient time to compute how often the Brooklyn bridge has been sold to investors from Connecticut, or how many deeds for the Masonic Temple in Chicago are scattered from Warsaw, Ind., to Wataga, Ill. Nor will we ever know the exact amounts invested by our progressive agriculturists in miracle wheat from Egypt and rain-making

machines. Suffice it to say that the deluded farmer and the bunko man

have been the universally accepted basic types around which the great American drama was built for a quarter of a century.

But behold, gentle reader, the worm has performed the about face; the shoe is on the other foot, and the coin is in the other pocket in this year of peace, 1920. The farmer of the telephone and the flivver, the mail order catalogue and the milking machine has got it back on "them slick city fellers, by heck!" From the arid fields of Texas and the nearbeer dives of Oklahoma there swells from uncounted rustic throats the chorus of merriment vulgarly known as the "horse laugh." They have beaten the confidence man at his own game, they have taken the fellow who sold

'Washington Star.

them the subway and persuaded him to buy an oil well—much less promising as a whole. The will-o'-the-wisp of yesteryear led those who sought the pot of gold up Broadway; today he glides over fields beneath whose furrowed surface lie the riches of Croesus. This reversal of form proves the scientific theory that if one is born every minute, certainly as many catch their first glimpse of daylight through the smoke-laden air of Pittsburgh or St. Louis as across the waving fields of Iowa.

It is human nature to crave easy money, and city dwellers and rustics. alike fall for the get-rich-quick scheme. Well do I remember the plausible gentlemen who approached me in the early days of my struggle against poverty with a plan to place me among America's cattle barons, and I bit, not knowing then what I have later learned from their heart-rending advertisements, what a miserable pittance those who supply our country with meat make from their altruistic efforts. I say I bit. I gave my friend $60, or, to be exact, two months' salary. With this sum he was to purchase for me a cow and place it on our great ranch in Texas. In a year I was to own a cow and a calf, in two years, four bovines; in three years, eight; in four, sixteen, and so on by arithmetical progression, until my herds were pushing each other over the Texas border. A number of my friends joined me in this simple and productive enter

prise. I waited what seemed to me a reasonable length of time; then called the promoter up and asked him how the little family was getting along, and he told me, in a choked voice, that my cow had died the preceding winter.

But was I discouraged? Not for a minute. I worked and saved and waited for the next opportunity. It came in the form of a chance to enter the rubber industry via the well-known Mexican plantation route. Our foreman was a writer beside whom Harold Bell Wright fades into insignificance as a depicter of sweet nature at her best. Through his monthly letters we could fairly see the little rubber trees push their sturdy way up toward the copper southern sky; could sense the golf balls and pneumatic tires almost bursting into bloom-and then came the deluge! The superintendent's literary ecstasy probably made him blind to the fact that the door to the plantation pigstye was left unfastened and ere the porkers were herded home our young and succulent trees were inside them. Valiantly the superintendent labored to save the stockholders by attempting to market the pigs, but the bacon proved so elastic and difficult to masticate that only a limited number of boarding houses were attracted by it. So again my investment proved a total loss. And then I awoke. I discovered that I must charge $160 off against something, and so I entered it "For Financial Education."

Later events have proved that my course of study was comparatively far less costly than that pursued by many of my fellow-citizens. It has been estimated that between $200,000,000 and $400,000,000 a year go from the invest

ing public of the United States into the pockets of promoters of worthless stocks. If the safety deposit boxes in cities and the bureau drawers of the country districts could give up their dead stores of fake securities, enough money would be disclosed to stagger the imagination. Few indeed are those who have not at least one beautifully embossed stock certificate over which they blush. When J. N. Dooley was bank commissioner of Kansas he estimated that before the "blue sky" legislation went into effect from $400,000,000 to $600,000.000 were taken annually from his state alone by those who sold worthless stock.

Down in Georgia Guy McLendon, Secretary of State, has prepared a set of eighteen searching questions which must be answered before a company will be granted a permit to sell stock in that state. He recently reported that out of more than 100 oil development companies asking the privilege, only two answered the questions as to their integrity in such a way that they were granted permits. The other ninetyeight are doubtless operating in some other part of the United States where the going is better-very possibly here in the national capital. The commission of corporations in California recently made public a test of nineteen fake stock concerns, most of them with names indicating an interest in the bonanza oil fields of west Texas.

Never was it easier for the fake promoter to operate than today. Swinging from the conservation practiced during the war, the American people have come to a point of senseless spending where they are literally begging someone to take their money away. A

state commission investigating the high cost of living verified this opinion when it announced that a provision dealer divided his day's supply of hamburger steak into two lots, marking part of it 42-cent hamburger had been sold and not a customer bought at 28 cents, although the meat was absolutely the

same.

I listened to a negro cotton picker in Sweetwater, Tex., demand the best socks in the store and take six pairs at $1.50 a pair. The merchant said that doubtless a pair of those hose would be worn in the field next day. Why not? The negro was getting $12 a day. And thus the merry whirl goes on. Easy come, easy go. Prices are high and I must get rich quick, and the fake promoter flourishes, while the fool investors ride to a terrible fall.

During the last two years between 20,000,000, and 30,000,000 American people who never were investors before have become capitalists by investing in Liberty Bonds and War Savings Stamps. Many of them have no knowledge of the principles of investment. Here is the chance for the bunco man. The field of the fraudulent promoter is easily widened, and in order to take full advantage of the occasion it is reported that schools are being established to drill salesmen whose business it will be to trade worthless securities promising a fabulous rate of interest for government securities. Untold numbers of fake scheme promoters and regiments of investment sharks, because of the popular ignorance as to financial matters, are pointing out short roads to big fortunes to those whose Liberty Bonds and War Savings Stamps they hope to secure in exchange for pretty pieces of paper with a nice gold seal.

These fakers know the value of a government bond, and they work on the theory that their victims do not. They know that these securities are bound to rise to par, and probably above, long before maturity. They frighten their victim with the statement that the bonds will decrease in value as time goes on and that an exchange should be made while the going is good.

There is one way in which any man can circumvent these schemes if he has any interest in keeping a respectable distance between himself and the poorhouse, and that is by getting expert advice before he enters into a financial transaction. When we are sick we consult a doctor, when we need legal advice we see a lawyer, but when the investment bug bites us, instead of consulting a banker or broker of recognized standing in our community, we sneak up an alley and pass over our hard-earned cash to someone who has hypnotized us with his fairy story of sudden wealth. Finance is a science every bit as exacting as medicine. If you believe that the patent medicine "doc" in the hack at the corner of Main Street on Saturday night can do more for you with his cure-all than your family physician, why, then, accept the word of the smooth-tongued promoter and shun your banker.

Your mental caliber is established. But if you want to get on in life, learn to lisp blithely when the promoter gets his foot in your front door, "I'll see my banker first"; you will find that this blue-sky salesman has for his motto, "Do it now." He does not wish for careful investigation. He will probably advise you that your banker will not give unbiased advice, because he himself has stocks to sell. But you can

take a chance on that, because your banker is figuring on living in town a few years, whereas your new-found friend has committed to memory the time of the next train going south before he rang your door bell.

Your banker will tell you a number of interesting things relative to the wisdom of trading your Liberty Bonds for questionable stock, as follows:

1. That if your Liberty Bonds are not good, then no stock you can purchase is worth the paper it is printed on. They are backed by the strength of the United States Government, and if that fails every private enterprise in the country will collapse.

2. That the greater the rate of interest you are promised the greater the risk you are running. In other words, men whose propositions are doubtful have to pay high rates of interest for their capital.

3. That in any plan of personal investment there should be a "back log" of absolutely safe securities-that's the Liberty Bond.

4. If you need ready money at any time, the bank will lend it to you with your Liberty Bond as security.

5. That the character of your invest

ment helps or hurts your community, or, as the Business Men's Anti-Stock Swindling League puts it, "Every busi ness is injured, in whatever line and whether it be large or small, by the consequences of a continued exploitation at the hands of fraudulent stock promoters, because the public is the customer of business. Clearly, if the customer is defrauded and impoverished, his buying power is impaired. Funds which he should employ for the improvement of his own condition, to his own profit and the profit of legitimate business are wasted.

Are you employing your funds for the improvement of your own condition, or are you weekly turning them over to someone who is crooked and smart? America is on a "money drunk." There is going to be a day after. The laws of economics are as unchanging as the laws of the Medes and Persians. You can't beat the game. There is just one way to win, and that is-learn the rules. And the one you should paste in your hat and look at every day in the year is that little old B. C. slogan that has stood the test of time, “A fool and his money are soon parted."