AUGUST 19, 1864:
As a
correspondent for the San Francisco Daily
Morning Call Mark Twain expounds
on corporate greed in his piece entitled What
Goes With The Money?
Since the recent
extraordinary expose of the concerns of the Grass Silver Mining Valley Company,
by which Stockholders discovered, to
their grief and dismay, that figures
could lie as to what became of some of their assessments, and could also be
ominously reticent as to what went with the balance, people have begun to
discuss the possibility of inventing a plan by which they may be advised, from
time to time, of the manner in which their money is being expended by officers
of mining companies, to the end that they may seasonably check any tendency
towards undue extravagance or dishonest expenditures that may manifest itself,
instead of being compelled to wait a year or two in ignorance and suspense, to
find at last that they have been bankrupted to no purpose.
And it is time their
creative talents were at work in this direction. The longer they sleep the
dread sleep of the Grass Valley, the more terrible will be the awakening from
it. Money is being squandered with a recklessness that knows no limit - that
had a beginning, but seemingly hath no end, save a beggarly minority of
dividend-paying companies - and after these years of expectation and this waste
of capital, what account of stewardship has been rendered unto the flayed stock
holder?
What does he know
about the disposition that has been made of his money? What brighter promise
has he now than in any by-gone time that he is not to go on hopelessly paying
assessments and wondering what becomes of them, until Gabriel sounds his
trumpet?
The Hale &
Norcross officers decide to sink a shaft. They levy forty thousand dollars.
Next month they have a mighty good notion to go lower, and they levy a twenty
thousand dollar assessment. Next month, the novelty of sinking the shaft has
about worn off, and they think it would be nice to drift a while - twenty
thousand dollars. The following month it occurs to them it would be so funny to
pump a little - and they buy a forty thousand dollar pump. Thus it goes on for
months and months, but the Hale & Norcross sends us no bullion, though most
of the time there is an encouraging rumor afloat that they are "right in
the casing!"
Take the Chollar
Company, for instance. It seems easy on its children just now, but who does not
remember its regular old monotonous assessment on them? "Sixty dollars a
foot! sixty dollars a foot! sixty dollars a foot!" month in and month out,
till the persecuted stockholder howled again.
The same way with the
Best & Belcher, and the same way with three-fourths of the mines on the
main lead, from Cedar Hill to Silver City. We could scarcely name them all in a
single article, but we have given a specimen or so by which the balance may be
measured. And what has gone with the money? We pause (a year or two) for a
reply.
Now, in some of the
States, all banks are compelled to publish a monthly statement of their
affairs. Why not make the big mining companies do the same thing? It would make
some of them fearfully sick at first, but they would feel all the better for it
in the long-run. The Legislature is not in session, and a law to this effect
cannot now be passed; but if one company dare voluntarily to set the example,
the balance would follow by pressure of circumstances. But that first bold
company does not exist, perhaps; if it does, a grateful community will be glad
to hear from it. Where is it? Let it come forward and offer itself as the
sacrificial scape-goat to bear the sins of its fellows into the wilderness.
