Men whose business it is to legislate must make choice between the two. To avoid the one, the other is inevitable. The writer of these pages stands for Reform. The evil complained of is that a portion of the policy-holders in Assessment companies have lost their insurance and their premiums paid through the destruction of the companies. To save others from the same fate, certain men cry out for the destruction of all the companies that remain. Ten men have died in a hospital from small-pox. Kill the other ninety by process of law, to save them from the possible fate of their companions! It is the purpose of these pages to point the way to Reform. It does not require either thought or study to point the way of Destruction. Even a fool, unguided, can find that. II. THE ARGUMENT FROM FAILURES. The press chronicles every disaster and makes a sensation out of every failure. The quiet routine of fulfilment of obligations finds no sensational chronicler. Two great failures of Assessment companies-failures that were well-nigh criminal in their needlessness and in the suffering and disappointment wrought-have occupied the public eye for two years. The advocates of destruction have sought to make it appear that these failures mark the end of all insurance, save that conducted by the other class of companies. So intent have they been to this end, as to lose sight of the $100,000,000 in death claims paid by Assessment companies during these two years. Does the crime of two or a dozen needless failures call for the destruction of a method of insurance under which more than $800,000,000 have been paid to widows and orphans? Common sense suggests that the machinery by means of which such results have been accomplished is too valuable to be lost. Shall we go back to stage-coaches, because an accident on a great trunk line occasionally brings loss of life and property? Thirty years ago, the oldest American companies operating on what is now known as the Legal-Reserve or Old-Line plan were about as old as are now the oldest Assessment companies. The press was then quite busy chronicling the failures of these so-called old-line companies. Fortunately, modern practice had not reached the refinement of killing the patient for fear he might die, or some one might have suggested the prohibition of all life insurance. The press comments aroused by these failures were as bitter as have been those since occasioned by the failures of Assessment companies. Neither in the one case nor the other are those comments safe guides, for naturally they are the result of passion and the excitement of the moment, and not of that cool judgment which should govern in a matter of this moment. In September last, Hon. John A. McCall, the honored former Superintendent of the New York Insurance Department, and the now no less honored President of one of the greatest of American Life Insurance companies, read before the National Convention of Insurance Superintendents and Commissioners a review of the history of life insurance, and in his words may be found a calm-and certainly not hostile-statement of facts: "The nine years immediately following the First Convention (1871) must be accounted the most trying period in the history of American Life Insurance. The number of companies which ceased doing business in New York was forty-six. Only four re-insured in companies that remained solvent; only ten others paid their liabilities in full. Receivers' reports are incomplete, but a careful examination of such as are accessible show the total loss to policyholders by failures among American companies to be about thirty-five million dollars. *** "Meanwhile the waste and extravagance of receiverships went on until they became almost as great a scandal as the mismanagement of companies that had brought them into being. * "The Legislature did but little to protect the interests of policy-holders, and the ill-timed denunciation of Life Insurance indulged in by some of its members often failed to discriminate between well- and ill-managed companies, and so added to public distrust. * * "The loss, to solvent companies, of business as well as prestige, during this period, was very great. In 1870 the income of the companies doing business in New York was $105,000,000, in 1879 it was $76,000,000; in 1870 the new business was $588,000,000, in 1879 it was $168,000,000; in 1870 the risks in force were $2,024,000,000, in 1879 they were $1,440,000,000. "Notwithstanding the removal of so many competitors from the field, the business of the thirty-one solvent companies was less in 1879 than that of the same companies in 1870; their income was two millions less, their risks in force were seventy millions less, and their new business had fallen off over onehalf. * ** "It has been the custom of writers who would exalt Life Insurance to give scant space |