INSURANCE FUND STARTED.
A proposal which gave rise to a considerable amount of discussion at the quarterly meeting, held in the beginning of December 1890, was that of the committee to form an insurance fund of their own. At the meeting of the committee immediately prior to that quarterly meeting, the members of the board agreed to recommend that £500 from the profits of that quarter be taken to start an insurance fund, and that a special meeting be held at the close of the quarterly meeting to consider the question of taking £1,000 from the reserve fund and placing it to the insurance fund. At the quarterly meeting the proposal was hotly debated. Approval of the proposal of the committee to allocate £500 to the insurance fund was moved, and was met by an amendment that the proposal be deleted from the minutes. This amendment became the finding of the meeting, receiving 104 votes against 87 votes for approval of the proposal. The subject cropped up again in the balance-sheet, where, in the “allocation of profit account,” the £500 was shown as being devoted to an insurance fund, and a further crop of motions and amendments was the result. It was moved that the £500 be added to the reserve fund; that the balance-sheet, as printed, be adopted; and that the £500 be carried forward to next quarter. The vote resulted in two favouring the transfer of the £500 to the reserve fund, while 113 favoured the adoption of the balance-sheet as printed, and 98 the carrying forward of the sum. This vote was a clear reversal of the previous one, and showed that the delegates had no very clear conception of the business on which they were voting or else that some of them had changed their opinions with almost lightning-like rapidity. One might be pardoned for believing that it should not be possible for a business meeting to come to two diametrically opposed decisions on the one subject at the same meeting. However, the result was that the committee got their insurance scheme through, and when the special meeting was called upon to transfer £1,000 from the reserve fund to the insurance fund this was done by 145 votes to 34; and the 34 were not cast against the proposal to have an insurance fund, but in favour of a proposal that the fund should be built up from the profits of the Society quarter by quarter. At the same meeting the payment to the members of the committee was again raised to 3/ a meeting, after having remained at 2/ for three and a half years.