Benefit or Friendly Societies. 



79 



had principally In view. They stated, however, in their Ueport, that " it is 

 certain that the oxperiencc ot* the offices for insurance on lives has profed 

 the Northampton Tables to be much more unfavourable to human life than 

 the purposes of those offices require ;" and recommended to the House to 

 resume their inquiry in another session, that such information might be ob- 

 tained, under parliamentary authority, as should place the question almost 

 beyond controversy. 



Report of Parliamentary Committee in 1827. 



The attention of this Committee was chiefly directed to the Superannua- 

 tion Allowances of Friendly Societies, and consequently to the average dura- 

 tion of life, on which all computations for such allowances must necessarily 

 depend. It was therefore indispensably requisite, that the history and ac- 

 curacy of the Northampton Tables should be more particularly considered 

 than they had been by the former Committee ; and that this has according- 

 ly been done, will appear from the following brief summary of the Minutes 

 of Evidence. 



April 3. 1827. — The Reverend J. T. Becher gives a detail of his investiga- 

 tions into various tables of mortality, and of the different mortuary registers 

 from which Dr Price had deduced the observations on which he constructed 

 the Northampton Tables. From such a concurrence of testimony as " was 

 brought under the consideration of Dr Price, when he originally formed the 

 Nortnampton Tables, I venture to presume that they were then render- 

 ed as correct as calculations founded upon the doctrine of such chances 

 could avail ; and consequently that they still remain sufficient for every prac- 

 tical purpose, unless some variation can be shewn in the ordinary standard of 

 mortality." — " In a note published by Mr Morgan upon Dr Price's Obser- 

 vations on Reversionary Payments, he states the mortality prevailing among 

 the members of the Equitable, or the proportions subsisting between the 

 claims that had been actually made, and the claims that should have been 

 made, according to the Northampton calculations : which statement of Mr 

 Morgan has, as I conceive, given rise to considerable misapprehension and 

 error. Subsequent calculations have been made by Mr Babbage, an eminent 

 mathematician, and by Mr Griffith Davies, an intelligent actuary of the 

 Guardian Office. Both of them have formed tables upon what they' denomi- 

 nate the experience of the Equitable, meaning the experience of Mr INIorgan, 

 as communicated to the public in the few lines which they cite as their ba- 

 sis. Now, in the year 1777, it will be found in the Journals of the House 

 of Commons, that when Mr Morgan gave evidence before the Usury Com- 

 mittee, he stated the claims made upon the Equitable to be to those which 

 should have been made, in the following proportion," Table I. " And in the 

 year 1810, Mr Morgan made a calculation for 30 years, upon 83,201 mem- 

 bers of the Equitable, from which he deduced, that the mortality which had 

 occurred was to the claims which might have been made," as in Table II. 



