Then, seven male lobbyists, at $3,000 each-- $21,000; one female lobbyist, $10,000; a high moral Congressman or Senator here and there--the high moral ones cost more, because they. give tone to a measure--say ten of these at $3,000 each, is $30,000; then a lot of small-fry country members who won't vote for anything whatever without pay--say twenty at $500 apiece, is $10,000; a lot of dinners to members--say $10,000 altogether; lot of jimcracks for Congressmen's wives and children--those go a long way--you can't sped too much money in that line--well, those things cost in a lump, say $10,000--along there somewhere; and then comes your printed documents--your maps, your tinted engravings, your pamphlets, your illuminated show cards, your advertisements in a hundred and fifty papers at ever so much a line-- because you've got to keep the papers all light or you are gone up, you know. Oh, my dear sir, printing bills are destruction itself. Ours so far amount to--let me see--10; 52; 22; 13;--and then there's 11; 14; 33-- well, never mind the details, the total in clean numbers foots up $118,254.42 thus far!"
"What!"
"Oh, yes indeed. Printing's no bagatelle, I can tell you. And then there's your contributions, as a company, to Chicago fires and Boston fires, and orphan asylums and all that sort of thing--head the list, you see, with the company's full name and a thousand dollars set opposite-- great card, sir--one of the finest advertisements in the world--the preachers mention it in the pulpit when it's a religious charity--one of the happiest advertisements in the world is your benevolent donation. Ours have amounted to sixteen thousand dollars and some cents up to this time."
"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.