“Good heavens!”

“Oh, yes.  Perhaps the biggest thing we’ve done in the advertising line was to get an officer of the U. S. government, of perfectly Himmalayan official altitude, to write up our little internal improvement for a religious paper of enormous circulation—­I tell you that makes our bonds go handsomely among the pious poor.  Your religious paper is by far the best vehicle for a thing of this kind, because they’ll ‘lead’ your article and put it right in the midst of the reading matter; and if it’s got a few Scripture quotations in it, and some temperance platitudes and a bit of gush here and there about Sunday Schools, and a sentimental snuffle now and then about ’God’s precious ones, the honest hard-handed poor,’ it works the nation like a charm, my dear sir, and never a man suspects that it is an advertisement; but your secular paper sticks you right into the advertising columns and of course you don’t take a trick.  Give me a religious paper to advertise in, every time; and if you’ll just look at their advertising pages, you’ll observe that other people think a good deal as I do—­especially people who have got little financial schemes to make everybody rich with.  Of course I mean your great big metropolitan religious papers that know how to serve God and make money at the same time—­that’s your sort, sir, that’s your sort—­a religious paper that isn’t run to make money is no use to us, sir, as an advertising medium—­no use to anybody—­in our line of business.  I guess our next best dodge was sending a pleasure trip of newspaper reporters out to Napoleon.  Never paid them a cent; just filled them up with champagne and the fat of the land, put pen, ink and paper before them while they were red-hot, and bless your soul when you come to read their letters you’d have supposed they’d been to heaven.  And if a sentimental squeamishness held one or two of them back from taking a less rosy view of Napoleon, our hospitalities tied his tongue, at least, and he said nothing at all and so did us no harm.  Let me see—­have I stated all the expenses I’ve been at?  No, I was near forgetting one or two items.  There’s your official salaries—­you can’t get good men for nothing.  Salaries cost pretty lively.  And then there’s your big high-sounding millionaire names stuck into your advertisements as stockholders—­another card, that—­and they are stockholders, too, but you have to give them the stock and non-assessable at that—­so they’re an expensive lot.  Very, very expensive thing, take it all around, is a big internal improvement concern—­but you see that yourself, Mr. Bryerman—­you see that, yourself, sir.”