222 INSURANCE 



government that its citizens should have made provision for the 

 future to so large an extent, and that the security for the eventual 

 payment of the sums assured, as they mature, should be guaranteed 

 by the solvency and sound investments of the companies that under- 

 write the contracts." Insurance companies derive their existence 

 from charters specially granted, but in conformity to the general 

 corporation laws of the different states. Corporations are by law 

 endowed with perpetual succession, or, in other words, artificial 

 persons having no necessary or natural term of life, and they may 

 be regarded as an extension of individual capacity. The earlier 

 charters of American insurance companies illustrate the crude ideas 

 regarding the business of life insurance prevailing at a time when 

 the term " insurance," in the words of Park, was practically equiva- 

 lent to "marine insurance." Almost from the beginning of the business 

 of insurance the importance and necessity of some form of state 

 supervision was recognized, and we meet with the inception of the 

 present form of state supervision in a Massachusetts statute of 1827, 

 which required the companies to report annually as to the condition 

 of their business. The growth of the business and the extension of 

 operations to other states developed the present system of state 

 supervision, which had its origin in a law passed by the legislature 

 of Massachusetts, establishing a separate department for the super- 

 vision of insurance interests, in 1855. To-day such departments 

 exist in every state and territory, with more or less comprehensive 

 powers for supervision and control. The resulting problems are of 

 most serious concern to the companies. 



The insurance laws of the different states are often widely at 

 variance with one another. The remark of Mr. Griggs, ex-Attorney 

 General of the United States, that while " the interpretation of law 

 is a science, law-making is not," applies with special force to the 

 insurance legislation of the last thirty years. When, in 1876, Mr. 

 C. C. Hine issued his volume on Insurance Statutes, within six years 

 of the issue of a similar work by Wolford, he could truthfully say 

 that " the insurance laws of five years ago are almost obsolete, and 

 in their stead new statutes have come upon the books of almost every 

 state and territory." The process of grinding out laws has gone 

 on with undiminished energy, and the opinion of a learned judge 

 that " no attorney is bound to know all the laws " may give some 

 comfort to the law officers of insurance companies confronted by 

 the problem of digesting the large number of special statutes passed 

 annually or biennially by forty-nine different states and territories for 

 the ostensible purpose of regulating the insurance business. In 

 marked contrast, we may reflect upon the English legislation affect- 

 ing insurance interests, which since 1870 has practially remained 

 the same. Mr. Griggs, in his address on " Law-Making, " properly 



