LAWSUIT OR LEGACY. 339 



Many thousands perhaps millions of years before man was on 

 the earth, the Laurentian Hills were raised above the dark waters, 

 their origin dating back to the very dawn of life on the planet. 

 Both the primordial continent and the primordial life were the 

 prophets this of the higher orders of organism, and that of the con- 

 tinents and islands yet to be. This original continent has held its 

 own. It took the initial in the building up of North America. Its 

 two lines of direction had the form of a right angle, one projecting 

 northeastward and the other northwestward. 



This is the normal plan. It is the structural arrangement, not of 

 this continent only, but of all continents ; and the lake-depressions, 

 conforming to the general system, are an additional witness to the 

 common underlying laws and forces of which the earth itself is a 

 grand phenomenon. 



LAWSUIT OR LEGACY. 



By H. H. GAEDENEK. 



WITHIN the past twenty years the business of life-insurance has 

 grown with such wonderful rapidity, and changed so radically 

 in its methods and contracts, that it is to-day as unlike its old self as 

 the railway-car is unlike the stage-coach. 



The old life-insurance contract undertook to define burglary, riot, 

 and rebellion, and the companies held themselves free from obligations 

 deliberately assumed, if the other party to the contract did not con- 

 form to the rules of conduct laid down under their definition and re- 

 quirements. Nowhere else in the history of large business organiza- 

 tions has the debtor regulated his obligation by the morals of his 

 creditor and liquidated his debt by acknowledging its existence, and 

 then simply charging moral obliquity on the part of said creditor as 

 the reason for not paying it. 



If A owes B fifty dollars, and B is known to be a thief or a mur- 

 derer, it does not liquidate A's debt to simply show that fact. But 

 life-insurance companies have held, and some of them still claim, the 

 right to so indemnify creditors, and, strange to say, they have been 

 able to conduct business on that basis. They have even gone further, 

 and said that a debt to B's heirs is forfeited in like manner thus 

 making the destruction of a man's reputation after his death of pe- 

 cuniary advantage to the company. They have been enabled to do 

 this because many men do not read the insurance contract which they 

 sign, and hence have no idea of its complicated and, in many cases, 

 unfair nature. If men insisted upon understanding the contract before 

 they sign it, as they do in other business, the more unfair features 

 would necessarily disappear from all insurance contracts. 



If I deposit a thousand dollars in a bank, it is my money I can 



