226 INSURANCE 



are important and proper subjects of economic inquiry, and the 

 immense progress of the business demands the impartial and critical 

 consideration of qualified experts in economic and social science. 

 The view of Macleod that " annuities or rights to receive a series 

 of future payments " are negative economic quantities, under which 

 term he comprehends all instruments of credit, shares in commercial 

 companies, policies of insurance of different kinds, etc., does not 

 seem to have been accepted by other writers on economic theory. 



The earlier writers on the investments of the working-class gave 

 considerable attention to life insurance and its relation to the general 

 welfare. Gregg, among others, wrote in 1851, or three years before 

 the practical beginnings of industrial insurance in England, that 

 " life insurance policies offer one of the most important channels of 

 investment for the savings of all classes;" and he adds, " Of all 

 modes of employing small savings, there is none which we should so 

 earnestly desire to become general among workingmen; none which 

 appears to us so deserving of the fostering care of the legislature; 

 none which, if universal and habitual, would do so much to diminish 

 those cases of utter and helpless destitution which press so heavily 

 on the resources of the community in the shape of poor-rates, and 

 which are the fruitful parents of a long progeny of calamity and 



crime. ' : 



The progress of insurance since this was written challenges the 

 admiration of the world. In the United Kingdom the industrial 

 companies alone, excluding collecting and other friendly societies, 

 have now some twenty-two million policies in force on the lives of 

 workingmen and their families. The question raised by Professor 

 Falkner as to whether " the growth of insurance in recent years 

 has been mainly among the well-to-do," can be emphatically an- 

 swered in the negative. In fact life insurance, almost from its incep- 

 tion, has met with greater appreciation among those who, for want 

 of a better term, we speak of as the working-class. This aspect 

 of the business is one of economic history rather than theory, but 

 here again we find that, with few exceptions, writers on the progress 

 of economic and social institutions have made little of a fact which 

 is none the less of profound economic importance and significance. 



The study of insurance history and the history of associations, 

 gilds, and friendly societies, is a most instructive chapter in eco- 

 nomics. Far back into ancient history careful students of commerce 

 and navigation have traced at least a semblance of our present form 

 of marine insurance. Anderson's History of Commerce contains some 

 very suggestive illustrations of a possible connection of present-day 

 methods to those of an earlier and almost forgotten time. Turner, in 

 his History of the Anglo Saxons, and Eden, in his State of the Poor, 

 throw mtich light on primitive methods of solving social problems 



