"Mother and Daughter." F. S. Verdi, M. D. J. B. Ford & Co.
"Marie. A Story of Russian Lore." Marie H. de Zielinski. Jansen, McClurg & Co.
"The Barton Experiment." By the author of "Helen's Babies." G. P. Putnam's Sons.
NEBULÆ.
—It would seem that we must return to the old fashion of strong boxes, old stockings, and cracked pipkins as the receptacles of our savings. As to savings banks and trust companies, and life insurance companies, the revelations of the last few months go to show that they do anything but save; that they are no longer to be trusted, and that they ensure nothing but total loss to those who put their money into them. Ere long it will be said of a young man that he was poor but honest, although he had the misfortune to have a father who was a director in several important financial institutions. The state of affairs in this respect is frightful; and it frightens. The financial panic has been followed by a moral panic which is really as much more deplorable than its predecessor as moral causes are more radical in their operation and more enduring than those which are merely material. Confidence is gone. How it is to be restored is a problem far more perplexing than how to revive drooping trade. For that the real wealth of the country, never greater than it is now and constantly increasing, must bring about sooner or later. But if men of wealth and of fair reputation are no longer to be trusted, what is the use of saving, to put money into a box where it gains nothing and where thieves break through and steal? Robbery seems to be the fashion; on the one hand masked burglars with pistols at your heads and gags in the mouths of your wife and children, and on the other hypocritical, lying, false-swearing, thieving scoundrels who get your money under fair pretences, and because of your trust in their characters and good faith, and then waste it in speculations and in luxurious living. Of the two, the burglars seem to be rather the more respectable. It is said, on good authority, that the West India slaves of a past generation could be trusted to carry bags of gold from one part of the Spanish Main to another, and that they were constantly so trusted with entire impunity. They would kidnap, and on occasion stab or cut a throat; but if they were trusted, they would not break their faith. The honesty of the Turkish porters is so well known that it has become almost proverbial. Does not the honesty of these pirates and pagans put to shame the Christians who with the professions and the faces of Pharisees "devour widows' houses"?
—For as to the business of life insurance, savings banks, and trust companies, it is somewhat more, or surely somewhat other, than mere business. And so those who practise it and profit by it profess that it is. A life insurance company is a grand combination philanthropico-financial corporation whose motto is, "Cast thy bread upon the waters, and after many days thou shalt receive it again." But the truth of the matter turns out to be that if you cast your bread upon the waters, the chances are that you will see it devoured before your eyes by financial sharks. One case in point has come directly to our knowledge. A gentleman, a Government officer, who has a moderate salary, with little or no hope of acquiring property, insured his life twenty years or more ago in what was thought a good company. His premium was always promptly paid even in the flush times of the war and afterward, when the fixed salaries of public officers lost more than half their purchasing power. Within the last few months he has suddenly found that his policy is not worth the paper on which it is magnificently printed. But worse than this: within the last few years, as age has crept upon him, there has come with it a disease which is incurable although he may live for some time longer. Now, however, he cannot get his life insured at all; no company will take his life; (it is a rueful jest to say that the company in question did take his life); and he has the prospect before him of a widow left entirely without provision, although for nearly a quarter of a century he and she stinted themselves to provide against such a contingency. Meantime the officers of the company lived luxuriously, and used the money in their hands for speculation, and in living which if not riotous, was at least shameless and dishonest. And they were all men of reputation, were selected for their positions because it was thought that men of their position and habits of life and outward bearing were incorruptible. Have they not devoured that prospective widow's house? If He who condemned the hypocritical Pharisees of old were on the earth now, would he not pronounce Woe upon them? And much would they care about His condemnation if they could get their commissions, and their pickings and stealings, and live in splendid houses, and be known as the managers of an institution that handled millions of dollars yearly, and whose offices were gorgeous with many-colored marbles, and gilding, and inlaid wood, and rich carpets!
And like their predecessors in the devouring of widows' houses for a pretence, they make long prayers. They, we say; but of course we do not mean all; for there are honest officers of life insurance companies, and even sound companies; but the number of both is shown day after day to be less and less; and when we think that those that we hear about are only they which have reached the end of their tether in fraud, perjury, and swindling, the prospect before us is one of the most disheartening that could be presented to a reflecting people. For remember, these defaulting, false-swearing life insurance and savings bank officers are picked men, and that their dishonest practices are from their very nature deliberate, slow of execution, and that in fact they have gone on for years. It is no clutch of drowning men at financial straws that we have here; it is the regular "confidence game" played on an enormous scale by men who are regarded as the most respectable that can be found in the whole community. They are vestrymen, and deacons, and elders, and grave and reverend signors, and these men have deliberately used and abused the confidence not only of the community in general, but of their friends and acquaintance, to "convey" in Nym's phrase, to steal in plain English, money which was brought within their reach because of their pretended high principle and their philanthropic motives. For, we repeat, it must constantly be kept in mind as an aggravation of these wrongs, that life insurance companies and savings banks are essentially and professedly benevolent institutions. They are, and they openly profess to be, chiefly for the benefit of widows and children. The man who takes to himself the money of a life insurance company or of a savings bank is not a mere thief and swindler; he robs the widow and the fatherless; he takes his place among those who are accursed of all men; and moreover, in all these cases he is a hypocrite of the deepest dye.
—In any case, however, there is reason for fearing that the business of life insurance has in the main long been rotten, even when it has not been deliberately corrupt. Professedly and originally a benevolent contrivance by which men of moderate incomes could year by year make provision for wives and children who might otherwise be left destitute, it was reasonable and right to expect that the business of life insurance would be conducted upon the most economical principles and in the simplest and most unpretending fashion; that there would have been only as much expenditure as was absolutely necessary for the proper conduct of the business; and that safety for the insured would have been the first if not the only ruling motive with the insurers. And such indeed was life insurance in the beginning. But by and by it was found that there was "money in it," and the sleek, snug hypocrites that prey upon society under the guise of philanthropy and religion began to swarm around it. Life insurance companies began to have a host of officers; they had "actuaries," whatever they may be, who, by whatever motives they were actuated, contrived and put forth statements which to the common mind were equally plausible and bewildering; they entered into bitter rivalry with each other in their philanthropic careers; they had agents who went abroad over the land in swarms, smooth-speaking, shameless creatures who would say anything, promise anything so long as they got their commissions; they published gorgeous pamphlets, tumid and splendid with self-praise, and filled with tabular statements that justified and illustrated the denying that there is nothing so untrustworthy as facts, except figures; they contrived the "mutual" plan, by which they made it appear to some men that they could insure their own lives—which is much like a man's trying to hoist himself over a fence by the straps of his boots—and yet these mutual officers, benevolent creatures, were as eager to get business and as ready to pay large commissions as if, poor, simple-minded souls, they had expected to get rich by life insuring; and then they put up huge and enormously expensive buildings, more like palaces than any others known to our country. And all this came out of the pockets of those who are, with cruel mockery, called the insured. It is the old story: ten cents to the beneficiary and ninety cents to the agent through whose hands the money passes. Is it not plain, merely from the grand scale and the large pretence on which this life insurance business has been carried on of late years, that it is rotten? It is a scheme for making money. Now, making money is right enough; but when it is carried on under philanthropic and benevolent pretences its tendency must naturally be, as we have seen that it has been, to gross corruption and the most heartless fraud.