corner it,
classify it into authentic, apocryphal, barber's gossip, and so forth,
and then sell it, for the sole benefit of the consumer, in lengths to
suit all purchasers. In _The Devil is an Ass_ he is a little more
outspoken.

We'll take in citizens, commoners, and aldermen To bear the charge,
and blow them off again like so many dead flies....

This was exactly what was at that very moment being done in the case of
the Alum Trust. All the leading characters of much more modern times
were there already; Fitzdottrell, ready to sell his estates in order to
become His Grace the Duke of Drown'dland, Gilthead, the London
moneylender who 'lives by finding fools,' and My Lady Tailbush, who
pulls the social wires at court. And so the game went on, usually with
the result explained by Shakespeare's fisherman in _Pericles_:

'I marvel how the fishes live in the sea'---'Why, as men do a-land:
the great ones eat up the little ones.'

The Newcastle coal trade grew into something very like a modern American
trust with the additional advantage of an authorized government monopoly
so long as the agreed-upon duty was paid. Then there was the Starch
Monopoly, a very profitable one because starch was a new delight which
soon enabled Elizabethan fops to wear ruffed collars big enough to make
their heads--as one irreverent satirist exclaimed--'look like John
Baptist's on a platter.'

But America? Could not America defeat the machinations of all monopolies
and other trusts? Wasn't America the land of actual gold and silver
where there was plenty of room for everyone? There soon grew up a wild
belief that you could tap America for precious metals almost as its
Indians tapped maple trees for sugar. The 'Mountains of Bright Stones'
were surely there. Peru and Mexico were nothing to these. Only find
them, and 'get-rich-quick' would be the order of the day for every true
adventurer. These mountains moved about in men's imaginations and on
prospectors' maps, always ahead of the latest pioneer, somewhere behind
the Back of Beyond. They and their glamour died hard. Even that staid
geographer of a later day, Thos. Jeffreys, added to his standard atlas
of America, in 1760, this item of information on the Far Northwest:
_Hereabouts are supposed to be the Mountains of Bright Stones mentioned
in the Map of ye Indian Ochagach._

Speculation of the wildcat kind was bad. But it was the seamy side of a
praiseworthy spirit of en