INSURANCE SOCIETIES 



There is reason to believe that as early as the eighteenth 

 century Danish peasants formed primitive and informal village 

 societies for the purpose of insuring against loss of live stock, 

 a kind of co-operation whereby losses were at once covered 

 by a levy on the members. Early in the nineteenth century 

 several insurance societies were formed, of which one, dating 

 from 1812, is still in existence. Its bye-laws, amended in 

 1855, containing reminiscences of the old village laws (in 

 Danish " bye lov "), provided not only for the insurance of 

 horses and cattle, but also for the keeping of a village bull and 

 village boar for the common use of members, i.e. the peasants 

 in the village. Down to the year 1900 there were as many as 

 41 such societies still in existence, which had been formed 

 previous to the free constitution of 1849. All these were quite 

 small and primitive in their organisation. After 1850 insurance 

 societies were formed in greater numbers, and of more modern 

 kinds, but most of them confined their sphere of action to one 

 or two parishes, some of them even stipulating that only 

 peasants could be admitted as members. Only one society 

 was for farmers all over the country, and a few were for a group 

 of parishes, a district (Amt). It was for some time a disputed 

 point whether insurance societies should be small and co- 

 operative, or large and joint stock companies ; but, as was the 

 case in France and Germany, the small societies eventually 

 held the field. There is only one joint-stock insurance com- 

 pany in Denmark, viz. " Pan," formed in 1901. The reason 

 is that small societies have the advantage that members have 

 a better opportunity of controlling one another, a point which 

 is of greater importance in societies insuring horses and cattle 

 than in any other kind of insurance. The premiums in small 

 societies are, therefore, smaller, and the costs of administration 



