224 INSURANCE 



of litigation and court decisions usually comprehended under the 

 term " insurance law." A retrospect over the years since the 

 " Court of Insurance " was established by Queen Elizabeth, and the 

 sixty-odd cases tried during its entire history, to the present time 

 would carry us far beyond our present purpose. Suffice it to say 

 that the development of insurance law has gone forward with the 

 growth of the business until this term now comprehends a variety 

 of subjects unknown and unthought of at the time when Park and 

 Marshall first published their works, about a century ago. Consid- 

 ering the enormous extent and highly complex character of the 

 insurance business, it is a matter of surprise to find that, after all, 

 the amount of litigation should have been so small. 



The tendency has been constantly towards a contract free from 

 restrictions likely to lead to litigation, until the insurance policy of 

 to-day is practically a promise to pay a certain sum on the occur- 

 rence of a given event, except in the case of fraud. There has always 

 been an unfortunate disposition on the part of the courts to construe 

 a policy of insurance more upon the grounds of sentiment than upon 

 the common law of contract and fraud. Mr. Davies, the eminent 

 solicitor of the Mutual Life, has discoursed upon this matter in so 

 able and interesting a manner that I take the liberty of quoting to 

 some extent from his lectures on the law of life insurance : 



" A suit upon a life policy is an especially difficult one to defend 

 for several reasons. In the first place, there exists in this country 

 a very general prejudice against corporations, which inclines a jury 

 to view with favor any claim by an individual against one of them. 

 Then the plaintiff is usually a widow or some other dependent of 

 the deceased, and the contrast is strongly drawn by counsel arguendo 

 between her poverty and the heaped-up millions of the defendant, 

 the corresponding liabilities of the latter being carefully kept in the 

 background. . . . And to these considerations must be added 

 another of a much higher character, that natural human instinct 

 which leads us all to speak well, and to endeavor to think well, of the 

 dead. The fall of the curtain upon a human life covers at the same 

 time his faults and vices, and adds enormously to the difficulty of 

 establishing to the satisfaction of a jury facts which are notorious, 

 but which blacken his memory. The very neighbors, who during 

 a man's life denounce him as a worthless sot, will, when called as 

 witnesses in a suit upon a policy on his life, reluctantly admit that 

 he perhaps on rare occasions drank to excess, but not to an extent 

 to impair his usefulness or affect his health. So when a suicide takes 

 place the associates of the deceased at once begin to think that they 

 had previously noticed symptoms of aberration of mind, quite suffi- 

 cient to justify a strong suspicion of his sanity, although no such 

 idea had ever occurred to them before the catastrophe." 



