28 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences^ Arts, and Letters. 



aod thousands and tens of thousands of our young men, abdicat- 

 ing their own financial skill, have been cramping themselves and 

 rendering themselves useless to everybody and everything in their 

 own diiy and vicinity by carrying large policies on their lives. 

 The aggregated premiums have constituted vast sums for which 

 the directors of the company couM not or would not find safe in- 

 vestment, and so we have had the recent history of insurance, and 

 the end is not yet. 



There is absurdity on the face of the matter that the directors 

 of an insurance company can make and keep fortunes for forty or 

 fifty thousand families. Propitious circumstances in singular in- 

 stances may accomplish prodigies in this direction. But if that 

 style of fortune making can be long and widely carried on with 

 success, then most men ivere made in vain ; man is a botch, and it 

 is idle to reason about him or his afi;airs. 



Well, this system of delegating to others what intellectually 

 and morally pertains to ourselves, having failed on the old plans, 

 the air is full of new schems. The only one which we can notice 

 is the one which puts the national government into the breach. 



The secretary of the treasury proposes a subdivision of the in- 

 terest-bearing national debt minutely enough to put it into the 

 power of the poor to utilize it as a savings bank system. That, 

 for its own purposes, the government did not long ago do this is 

 a wonder. Bat for the poor it is simply a proposition to tie the 

 times up tighter ; to take another twist on the screw of constric- 

 tion under which the poorer classes already groan. 



The result will be to collect all the little rills and send them 

 just where all the greater streams have gone, to swell the vast 

 amounts locked up in U. S. bonds, insurance assets, securities and 

 stocks of all sorts — amounts removed partially or entirely from 

 participation in the living enterprises by which society is sup- 

 ported and out of which wages are paid. It may be best under 

 our present circumstances to adopt the plan. But let us clearly 

 understand that the policy is a make-shift any way. Suppose, as 

 all honest men mean it shall, the government sets the high exam- 

 ple of paying its debts, what will become of this system of sav- 

 ings banks? Must the government keep in debt in order to main- 



