LIFE INSURANCE AS A SCIENCE 233 



honest man as upon the most opulent individual, parent, or husband 

 in the world to his wife and his helpless offspring." It is the 

 mission, the aim, and the object of insurance, primarily and chiefly, 

 to diminish dependence and increase by individual effort, frugality, 

 and forethought the social and economic independence of the masses. 



While insurance may rightfully claim recognition as a science, as 

 a business pursuit it is still far from being a professional career. 

 The general aspect of insurance as a career or business pursuit has 

 been discussed in much detail by the Honorable John F. Dryden in 

 a paper contributed to a series of articles on the subject to the New 

 York Tribune. Of late years insurance education has been intro- 

 duced into colleges and universities, sometimes in connection with 

 general instruction in commerce and banking, as, for illustration, in 

 the Charter School of Finance, University of Pennsylvania, and in 

 the University of Wisconsin; or occasionally as an independent course 

 of instruction, as, for illustration, at Yale. In a general way, how- 

 ever, it is yet too early to speak of insurance education as professional 

 training. The general method of instruction in insurance is still 

 of too elementary a character, the elements of success in office and 

 field administration are too ill-defined, and the principles of business 

 conduct are too far from being reduced to scientific uniformity to 

 permit us to speak of insurance as a professional career. 



But as a business pursuit it is deserving of the most serious con- 

 sideration, and I may repeat the glowing tribute to the insurance 

 agent by Elizur Wright that " among the honorable workers in the 

 civilized world to whom the public as well as the insured will die 

 indebted, we give faithful and successful life insurance agents a 

 high place. It is hardly possible to believe that a life insurance agent 

 can achieve any long-continued success without bringing into action 

 some of the noblest qualities of a sterling man, and no field that we 

 know of is more inviting to an ambition that would devote the best of 

 talents to the benefit of society at large and individuals in particular." 



A prerequisite for an effective university education is the need 

 of comprehensive or approximately complete insurance libraries. 

 All of the more important companies have libraries of more or less 

 extent on insurance, statistics, and related sciences, but the three 

 libraries deserving of special mention are the Walford collection of 

 the Equitable Assurance Society, the Bibliotheque de 1'Utrecht, and 

 the library of the Prudential Insurance Company of America. The 

 Prudential Library of insurance and statistics includes over twenty 

 thousand volumes and pamphlets, supplemented by an extensive 

 collection of data on every subject relating to insurance science. 

 The Boston Insurance Society has a good library, of which a cata- 

 logue has been published. The Life Insurance Company of Utrecht 

 has published a valuable catalogue, which has been reissued in a 



