34 o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



withdraw it when I please, subject, of course, to business rules, which 

 have nothing to do with ray standing as a citizen. The bank has 

 nothing to say in regard to my loyalty or my honesty in other affairs. 

 My money can not revert to the bank on outside ethical or moral 

 grounds. But in life-insurance a business in which more money is 

 invested than in banking the opposite rule has been, and to some 

 extent still is, in operation. 



There were a few companies, it is true, which rarely took advan- 

 tage of their reserved right to mulct a family of money actually 

 received, upon the plea of outside ethical delinquencies of the dead 

 which had nothing to do with his length of life and there are com- 

 panies, at the present time, which have voluntarily eliminated the 

 greater part of these oppressive regulations and reserved rights from 

 their forms of contract. But in many of the companies they still 

 remain in full force, and in almost all there are improvements of a 

 most important nature needed even yet. 



In other words, while one or two companies have made their con- 

 tracts, in large part, what contracts purport to be, a guarantee of good 

 faith that, if so much money is paid to them during a stated interval, 

 they will return to the j)arty insured, or to his heirs, a stated sum at a 

 given time there are still many which have not so improved their 

 contracts, and are doing business in the old way, depending for suc- 

 cess on the ignorance of their applicants in regard to the unfair 

 conditions of the contracts which they sign. A few have left out 

 most of the thousand and one ifs and ands and providcds of the old 

 regime, and have at last undertaken to conduct this important and 

 rapidly-growing business on strictly business principles, and the results 

 have abundantly attested the wisdom of the new departure and indi- 

 cate the advisability of still more liberal measures. A man may now, 

 if he is careful and wise in his choice of a company, insure his life, or, 

 if insured, he may have the temerity to die, without a fairly-grounded 

 expectation of leaving his family a lawsuit for a legacy. He may 

 also be reasonably sure that he is not placing his own reputation (after 

 he is unable to defend it) at the mercy of a powerful corporation 

 intent upon saving its funds from the inroads of a just debt. And I 

 question if it is too much to say that, given enough money, a strong 

 motive, and a powerful corporation, on the one hand, and only a sor- 

 rowing family upon the other, and no man ever lived or died whose 

 reputation could not be blackened beyond repair, after he was himself 

 unable to explain or refute seeming irregularities of conduct or dis- 

 honesty of motive. No man's character is invulnerable, and no man's 

 reputation can afford the strain or test of such a contest. Millions of 

 dollars have been withheld from rightful heirs by threats of an expos- 

 ure the more vague the more frightful of the unsuspected crimes 

 or misdeeds of the beloved dead. 



Thousands of cases never known to the public have been "com- 



