Page:The Brass Check (Sinclair 1919).djvu/447

 the amount that each will contribute each year to make up the permanent deficit.

Please do not send money for the paper. I will let you know when I reach that stage, and meantime I do not want the responsibility of keeping money. If you are enough interested in the plan to care to help in advertising it, printing circulars and soliciting pledges from people of means, I will be glad to receive such money and to account for it. If I succeed in raising the necessary sum, I will name an organization committee, and have a charter prepared, and submit the whole matter to you for endorsement.

Sometimes people criticize my books as being "destructive." Well, here is a book with a constructive ending. Here is something to be done; something definite, practical, and immediate. Here is a challenge to every lover of truth and fair dealing in America to get busy and help create an open forum through which our people may get the truth about their affairs, and be able to settle their industrial problems without bloodshed and waste. Will you do your share?

PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Two years ago I finished "The Profits of Religion," and offered it to publishers. They said it could not be sold; no book on religion could be sold, it was the deadest subject in the world. I believed that "The Profits of Religion" could be sold, and I published it myself. In less than a year I have sold forty thousand copies, and am still selling them.

One reason, of course, is the low price. Everybody told me that a book could not be published at that price. I would report on the figures if I could, but I gave the book as a premium for my magazine, and never made any attempt to separate the two ventures. All that I can report is that since February, 1918, when I started the magazine, I have taken in for magazines and books a total of $14,269, and I have paid out for printing, postage, labor and advertising, a total of $20,995. This deficit represents some two hundred thousand magazines sent out free for propaganda purposes; the deficit was made up by donations from friends, so it cost me nothing but my time, which I gladly gave. And I am willing to give it again; I can't expect either royalty as author or profit as publisher from "The Brass Check." The cost of book manu