And from whom comes the proof of the treacheries and rascalities perpetrated within the Equitable? From the men who control and manage this great institution and its hundreds of millions of accumulations. When my accusations first appeared, these men saw the handwriting on the wall and some of them, bolder than others, determined to seize these vast hoards of the public's money and at the same time get possession of all evidence of past crimes so that they might be immune forever after from punishment and the necessity of making restitution. In the act of grabbing, however, the robbers fell out with one another, and, presto! they are in the public square where all men, women, and children, cats, dogs, and asses may see and hear as they gouge, bite, and accuse each other of the vilest crimes.
These are the men in whose custody even now are the accumulations on which you, Mr. Policy-holder, are depending to take care of your wife and little ones, should you die. On the honor and responsibility of men who in the past five years have "saved" out of salaries of $20,000 to $100,000, private fortunes of millions, you must absolutely rely for the safety of the billions of dollars of your savings. The future of the helpless beings whom your hard daily labors provide with a livelihood is in the hands of men who admit having expended $100,000 of your money to provide a lordly and regal entertainment for a set of extravagantly paid agents and solicitors who, spurred on by prodigal inducements, have piled up huge amounts of new business on the company's books. I have explained to you before what such business is worth, that the agent gets so large a commission that he is practically in a position to accept risks at far below their cost to the company, and that such business as this is seldom renewed. The same men have been paying personal secretaries, gardeners, and flunkies out of your earnings; they have been feasting and traveling in private cars with large parties of the New York flubstocracy at your expense; every possible extravagance they have been guilty of by means of the revenues some of you have worked fourteen to eighteen hours a day to gather in. Shame, I say, on such contemptible thievery.
I cannot resist the temptation to pull back the slide from one episode of the past. When my strictures on the three great life-insurance companies first appeared, one of the vice-presidents of the Equitable, Gage E. Tarbell, in writing to an inquiring policy-holder, said: "Pay no attention to Lawson; he is only a reckless stock gambler, and every sensible person knows that any man, no matter what his position might be, who would do anything to cause loss to the class of people we insure, must be a rascal." And this is the same man Tarbell, it is now admitted by all the Equitable officers and investigating committees, who, as soon as he saw the crisis coming in the affairs of the Equitable, had his pal, President Alexander, pay to him $135,000, which he claimed was due him for commission renewals, even though he was then in receipt of a salary of $60,000 per annum for his services. It is through the operations of this same Tarbell that the vast system of rebates, one of the chief evils of the present system of life insurance, came into being, and through his prodigality that the immense sum of $2,000,000 stands on the books of the company, representing advance commissions to the pampered agents.
The time has come for all you policy-holders to act, and there is but one way to act.
A thousand and one schemes are afloat to confuse and trick you at this period. The cry is—anything to hush things, to confine the fire to the Equitable, at any cost, even though it totally consumes the $400,000,000 of the people's savings in that institution. I told you at the beginning that the New York Life was worse, if anything, than the Equitable, and the Mutual Life just as bad. Therefore I unqualifiedly advise policy-holders to:
1. Pay up this year's premium—it will be the last to these plunderers.
2. Have nothing to do with any committee or scheme.
3. Write me, at once, your name, address, and the amount and character of your policy. I want nothing more from you, and under no consideration will I divulge your name without your further consent in writing.
I already have the names of thousands of policy-holders, but to make my plan instantly effective I must have scores of thousands.
My plan has for its aim and end, this and only this: