AND   BITILDEBS'   GUIDE





V6L.L]





SATURDAY, APRIL 18, 1868.





[No. 5.





i                Published Weekly by ,

C.  W;   SWEET   &  CO.,

Room 31 World Buildino, No. 87 Pabk Row.

TERMS.
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THE LIFE INSUEANCE HUMBUG.

"Life is uncertain. Death is sure I " says
the insurance agent, as he stalks into your
place of business, like a bird of evil omen,
and tries to scare you into the belief that you
really ought to get your life insured; and if
you give him any encouragement, a dialogue,
similar to the following, generally occurs:

Agent.—"Now, really, sir, from your ap¬
pearance you ought to be insured. How old
may you be, sir ? "

GENTLE.AfAN.—" Oh, about thirty-five."

Agent.—" Humph. Under the most favor¬
able circumstances, you will probably not
live to be more than twice that age. Only
think of it, half your Ufe gone for a certainty,
nay, more than half, for according to the
mortuary tables the avejrage age is but forty-
five years, so that you may actually be upon
the brink of the grave even now."

Gentleman.—" Do you think I look like a
dying man ? "

Agent.—" No ; but appearances are often
very deceitful. Why, sir, I insured a gentle¬
man one day, for $20,000, who was the very
picture of health, and that day week he was
a corpse, and the last words that he spoke
were these : 'Do not grieve for me, dear
firiends; I am quite contented to die; I have
robbed death of its sting by getting my life
insured; go thou and do likewise.'"

And with this kind of argument he has
succeeded five times out of ten in disposing
of his policies. But the eyes of the people
are beginning to open. They begin to
wonder how it is, that men who were once
too poor to pay their grocer, can now ride in
their barouche, and drive a la tandem to the
races, occupy the best pew at church, a box
at the Opera, and dwell in a superb broAvn
stone mansion away up among the crime de
lacrtme of society—and all out of the income
they derive from the percentage they are
allowed on the premiums that they collect
from -the insured. Mind you, these men are
but the agents, who are supposed to get the
crumbs merely. Now, is ii reasonable to
Buppdse that these life insurance companies
can' afford to pay to their agents the heavy





percentage they do, ranging, as we have been
assured it does, from fifteen to twenty, and, .in
some instances, to twenty-five per Q^nCl^said
percentage being allowed not only upon the
first premium, but upon every dolla'r that is
paid in upon each and every policy that has
been issued through the instrumentality of
the agent. Can they afford to do this and
prosper? The idea is preposterous. Why,
if every person that is now insured should
live to the fuU age allotted to man, always
supposing that they, the insured, pay aU their
premiums promptly to the end of the terra''
agreed upon, the profits would not admit of
such a heavy percentage, unless they should
happen to invest their funds in a mine that
would produce a nugget of gold as big as a
sugar loaf for every single dollar so invested;
for it must be borne in mind that the officers
of life insurance companies draw big salaries,
and spend enormous amounts annually for
advertising purposes, some of Avhich are of
the most costly description. Some few weeks
ago, a gentleman in our hearing, while riding
in one of the Brooklyn cars, said to a neigh¬
bor, with whom he was conversing on the
subject of insurance : " Do you see that
large mansion surrounded by trees, that one
with .an observatory on the top of it? " point¬
ing in the direction, " I do," said the other.
" Well, that was all bought out of percentage on
policies of life insurance, and the present own¬
er, a year or two ago, had judgpdents against
him to the amount of fifty thousand dollars;
he did not own a dollar in the world; he is
rich now, however, and has also paid olF all
his debts." In A'iew of such revelations as
these, it is no wonder that such eminent au¬
thority upon Ufe insurance as Elizur Wright
should say : " Never since financiering be¬
came an art or a science has any scheme been
invented whereby fraud can be rendered so
respectable and secure as this life insurance,
with the most noble and indispensable object
in the world; its methods are inscrutable to
the public, and its ways past finding out. If
the government does not, in a thorough,
scientific, and comprehensive manner, watch
the companies or set them to watching
each other, twenty years cannot roll away
before all the frauds on the treasury, of Avhich
we now hear so much, will be eclipsed and
made insignificant by those of life insurance.
One ounce of prevention now is better than
one thousand 'pounds' of cure then." A
man like Mr. Wright is not liable to make
such remarks as these Avithout having good
grounds for believing that fraud in life insur¬
ance does exist, and that, too, to an alarming





extent. Mr. Wright says the government
should watch the companies; but in order to
get the government to do so, the people
must agitate the matter, and the way to do it
is to call a meeting at once, and let every
policy-holder attend that meeting; then ap¬
point a competent committee of investiga¬
tion ; and if the report of the committee is
not satisfactory, send a delegation to Albany
with a petition, calling upon the government
to investigate the matter, and to enact such
.Jaws as will compel each and every life insur¬
ance company to give full and ample security
for the payment of all policies that are now
and may be hereafter issued by them. A
movement Uke this will shake all the rotten
concerns to their very foundations; and if the
earth in reality should gape and SAvallow
them, it would be a fit retribution for all the
misery they will cause to thousands of poor
families who have and are daily stinting and
impoverishing themselves in order to keep
their policies paid up, with a'fuU belief that if
their natural provider should be taken away
from them prematurely, they would have a
certain amount of money to assist them in
their hour of distress. This is the staff they
lean upon. A staff that in majority of in¬
stances is sure to break when its help is most
needed.





EEPOET   ON   THE  NEW  POST-OITICE.

In our last issue we made some remarks
about this building, which now appear almost
prophetic. We expressed our fears that by
the unwise employment of so many archi¬
tects about the same design nothing satisfac¬
tory could result; and what we then treated
as only probable has already been fully realiz¬
ed. Since then the report of the supervis¬
ing architect of the Treasury Department,
Mr. A. B. MuLLETT, has been presented to
Congress, and, judging by this report, the
builders of Babel were in no greater quan¬
dary by the confusion of tongues than the
five architects of our Post-Office seem to
have been by their confusion of ideas.

The report is certainly one of the moat
scathing criticisms that we have ever seen
upon a public structure; and Avhile the very
withholding of these plans from public inspec¬
tion—of which we complained in our last—
prevents us from forming any counter opi¬
nion, we are sorry to say that Mr. Mullett's
objections throughout seem fortified by such
irresistible arguments and data as to leave
very little doubt that the present design for
the Post-Office is a huge blunder, froni
beginning to end.