374 Insurance and Gambling. [CHAP. xv. 



Unions (in respect of some of their functions), together with 

 innumerable other societies which go by various names. 

 Sometimes they are companies worked by proprietors or 

 shareholders for a profit, like any other industrial enter 

 prise. This is the case, I believe, with the majority of the 

 ordinary Life Insurance Societies. Sometimes, again, it is 

 the State which undertakes the management, as in the case 

 of our Post Office Insurance business. 



5. It is clear that there is no necessary limit to the 

 range of application of this principle 1 . It is quite conceiv 

 able that the majority of the inhabitants of some nation 

 might be so enamoured of security that they should devise 

 a grand insurance society to cover almost every concern in 

 life. They could not indeed abolish uncertainty, for the 

 conditions of life are very far from permitting this, but they 

 could without much difficulty get rid of the worst of the 

 consequences of it. They might determine to insure not 

 merely their lives, houses, ships, and other things in re 

 spect of which sudden and total loss is possible, but also 

 to insure their business ; in the sense of avoiding not only 



1 The question of the advisability moderate loss and contingent great 



of inoculation against the small-pox, loss. In the seventeenth century it 



which gave rise to much discussion seems to have been an occasional 



amongst the writers on Probability practice, before a journey into the 



during the last century, is a case in Mediterranean, to insure against 



point of the same principles applied capture by Moorish pirates, with a 



to a very different kind of instance. view to secure having the ransom 



The loss against which the insurance paid. (See, for an account of some 



was directed was death by small-pox, extraordinary developments of the 



the premium paid was the illness insurance principle, Walford s In- 



and other inconvenience, and the surance Guide and Handbook. It is 



very small risk of death, from the not written in a very scientific spi- 



inoculation. The disputes which rit, but it contains much informa- 



thence arose amongst writers on the tion on all matters connected with 



subject involved the same difficulties insurance.) 

 as to the balance between certain 



