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charter, was to consist of shareholders, the number of shares not to exceed 2000. Age, from twelve to forty-five, made no difference in the subscription or premium, and the state of health was equally disregarded. The net income was divided annually amongst the representatives of the deceased, and the receipts necessarily varied with the seasons. According to the printed plan of the Amicable for the present year, Five subsequent Royal Charters and two special Acts of Parliament enable this Society to proceed upon principles equally calculated to meet the convenience of the public with those of other Life Assurance offices, but with some considerable advantages.'

Judicial astrology is known to have advanced astronomy, and chemistry is under equal obligations to alchemy. Few popular delusions, provided they compel experimental trials and set intellect at work, are barren as regards progress; and the mania for speculation which reached its culminating point in the famous South Sea bubble, certainly helped to correct the ignorance and check the credulity which led to it. From 1708 to 1720, people were invited to anticipate, by a trifling sacrifice, every imaginable eventuality, the fear of which might disturb their peace of mind. For 5s. a quarter a man might insure the payment to his representatives of 1207. on his decease. A marriage-portion would be provided for persons of either sex, marry when they would, who should contribute 2s. a quarter; and Mr. Francis records the case of a gentleman and lady, who having paid 28. each, married each other, and claimed two marriage-portions from the assurers. The amount is sometimes left vague on the chance of its being exaggerated by fancy; but one prospectus engages that any persons, by paying 2s. at their entrance for a policy and stamps, and 2s. towards each marriage but their own, when the number is full, will secure to themselves 2001. and in the mean time in proportion to the number of subscribers.' Another scheme of mutual assurance has been preserved, under which each member was to contribute 2s. 6d. towards each baptized infant of a coassurer until he had one of his own, when he was to be entitled to 2007., 'the interest of which is sufficient to give the child a good education, and the principle reserved until it comes to maturity,' The list of the assurance projects of the South Sea bubble era, thirty in number, concludes with the following:

William Helmes, Exchange Alley, Assurance of Female Chastity.

Insurance from house breakers." Insurance from highwaymen. Assurance from lying.

Plummer and Petty's Insurance from death by drinking Geneva.

Rum Insurance.'

There was also an insurance office for

horses dying natural deaths, stolen or disabled, Crown Tavern, Smithfield,' to which the public attention was invited in rhyme :

'You that keep horses to preserve your ease, And pads to please your wives and mistresses, Insure their lives, and if they die we'll make Full satisfaction, or be bound to break.'

Conjugal affection was invoked in aid of the more regular description of insurance offices:

'Come all ye generous husbands with your wives, Insure round sums on your precarious lives, That, to your comfort, when you're dead and

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Kitty Sly, who pretended to come to him for sponding doctor, and a funeral. Again the advice."

At the head of the list of the creations of the bubble era stand 'The Royal Exchange' and The London Assurance' Companies. The second was the offshoot of the first on its not being able to admit all the claimants who flocked to it for shares. The primary cause of their foundation was the sense of insecurity resulting from the recent failure of private underwriters and assurers by the score; but whether from well-founded suspicion based on the condition of the money-market, or from a wish to make the most out of their rivalry with competing Companies, the law officers of the Crown were with difficulty prevailed on to sanction their application for charters. They were at first limited to fire insurance. Their charters extended to life assurance on the 29th of April, 1721; and Mr. Francis states that the earliest document (meaning, we presume, life policy) possessed by either of these companies is dated November 25th, 1721. It was granted by the London Assurance to Mr. Thomas Baldwin, on the life of Nicholas Bourne, for 1007., five guineas being the premium for a year.

insurers, individual and associated, bled to the tune of several thousands.

The same couple are supposed to be identical with an individual who figured some years later at Liverpool as a merchant, and his alleged niece who kept house for him. On this new arena he came out in the grave, decorous, and eminently respectable line, subscribing to charities, going regularly to church, and yielding to mundane vanities and indulgences only so far as to give good dinners. After a time he took the tone of one who had sustained unexpected reverses which compelled him to borrow money on the security of property depending on his niece's life. He effected policies accordingly; and the old game was played over again for the third time with similar success. So consummate was his acting, that when, after a decent delay, he left Liverpool under the pretence of escaping saddening reminiscences, he was not suspected; and it was only when the three adventures became known, and the circumstances were collated, that the truth broke upon the victims of the pair. Whether the medical men and the undertakers were bribed, or whether the lady possessed the power of simulating death, or whether she had discovered the secret of the draught compounded by Friar Lawrence for Juliet, remains a puzzle to this hour.

In the mean time science was unceas

solving the problem, or series of problems, touching the probabilities of life. It had made so little progress, however, or produced so faint an impression, when the Royal Exchange and the London Assurance began business, that, like their predecessor the Amicable, they made no difference between healthy and unhealthy lives, between youth and maturity, between 12 and 45. What, moreover, is equally remarkable, the next impulse in the right direction came from one whose first contribution to this branch of knowledge would hardly have lowered the dignity of philosophy, as understood by those sages of antiquity who contended that to produce what Bacon calls fruit' was beneath its high vocation. We allude to the mathematician whom Pope selects as the beau ideal of scientific accuracy :

The first notorious fraud perpetrated through the instrumentality of assurance was in 1730. A man and woman of the semi-genteel class, the woman about twenty, and the man old enough to be her fa-ingly if not very effectively employed in ther, residents of St. Giles's, were the actors. Scene the first was the seeming deathbed of the lady, round which the neighbours were hastily summoned in the middle of the night by her male companion, who called her his daughter, and said that she had been suddenly seized with pains in the heart. Before the doctor could arrive she was to all appearance a corpse, and after feeling her pulse he solemnly pronounced that all was over. Her remains were enclosed in a coffin and buried. The man claimed the amount insured on her life and disappeared. Not long after, a couple who had come to reside in Queen Square began to disturb the gossips of that then not unfashionable quarter. They did not profess to be married or otherwise related, and yet were every where together; but they kept a pleasant house; and when that is the case, neighbours are commonly disposed to shut their eyes to all but undeniable indications of impropriety. When this mode of life had been continued long enough to pave the way for the catastrophe, it came in the same shape as before-a heart complaint, a death struggle, a de

'Who made the spider parallels design,

Sure as Demoivre, without rule or line?'

It is related that Newton, when asked about doubtful points in his own productions, was wont to say, 'Go to Demoivre,

6

From twenty to thirty other works on merated by the writer in the Encyclopæthe same fertile topic are described or enudia Britannica, who also calls attention to the tables of Ulpian, one of the commentators of Justinian, in which the value of and to the Report on life annuities drawn life is carefully graduated according to age, up by John de Witt for the use of the States General of Holland in 1671. But so unaccountably slow were the commercial world and the general public in appreciating or applying the conclusions of abstract science or the suggestions of inventive genius, that precisely the same custom of lumping together lives of any age, from twelve to forty-five, which had been blindly adopted by the Amicable in 1706, and by the Royal Exchange and

he knows better than I do.' Alas for half of our life, because we have but 28 years science! he was driven by need in the more to live; and lastly, that before 50 we have decline of life to attend daily at a coffee-lived three-fourths of our life, because we can house in St. Martin's Lane to be consulted hope but for 16 or 17 years more. by gamesters and speculators about odds. and probabilities for such fees as he could pick up. His first work, published in 1718; was entitled The Doctrine of Chances, and he apologises in the Preface for its presumed tendency to promote gambling. Pascal, however, had preceded him in the same line; and at all events he completely obviated the objection in his next work, The Doctrine of Chances applied to the Valuation of Lives,' published in 1624, in which he propounded his well-known theory that the decrements of human life are uniformly progressive; i. e., that out are uniformly progressive; i. e., that out of a given number of persons of the same age, a calculable per-centage die every year until they are all extinct. By way of corollary he goes on to show that, taking the average extreme of human life at 86, the probable duration of a life may be estimated by halving the difference between that and the actual age of the age person. Thus, a man of 40 has 23 years to live. The soundness of this hypothesis has been roughly impugned, but Sir Francis Bailey awards Demoivre the high praise of having invented the most simple and elegant formulæ' for solving questions of everday occurrence, and says of his hypothesis that it will ever remain a proof of his superior genius and ability.'

Our limits do not admit of our giving a detailed account of the numerous works on the subject during the remainder of the century. Amongst the most useful were those which brought fresh materials to the existing stock in the shape of Tables; like Kerseboom's, taken from certain Dutch records; or De Parsieux's, deduced from the registries of religious houses in France; or Hodgson's, based on the renewed study of the London Bills of Mortality. Simpson, who, according to Mr. Francis, began life as a conjuror, and drove a pupil mad by raising or pretending to raise the Devil, is honourably conspicuous amongst the band; and in 1760 the famous Buffon published Tables based on the mortality of five French parishes. The pith of his discoveries is contained in a paragraph :

"The age at which the longest life is to be expected is 7, because we may lay an equal wager, or 1 to 1, that a child of that age will live 42 years and 3 months longer. That at the age of 12 or 13 we have lived a fourth part of our life, because we cannot reasonably expect to live 38 or 39 years longer; that in like manner, at the age of 28 or 29, we have lived one

London Assurance in 1721, was almost universal prior to the establishment of the Equitable in 1762.

business of assurance was but little understood 'In the year 1759,' writes Mr. Morgan, 'the and but little practised. Excepting the Society in Sergeant's Inn (the Amicable), which assured lives at all ages under forty-five at the same annual premium, and never exceeded 3001, on the same life, and the Royal Exchange Office, which made a few assurances for a single year at the general premium, I believe, of 57. per cent., the Equitable Society had no competitors, and were the only Society which varied their premiums according to the age of the person assured.'

The Rise and Progress' of the Equitable is the subject of a distinct work by Mr. Morgan, the ablest of its actuaries, and the principal author of its prosperity. Its Deed of Settlement, edited by him, fills an octavo volume. Its terms and rules have been subjected to a searching examination by many able writers, including Mr. Babbage and Mr. De Morgan. Some twenty years since we devoted the larger part of an article to them; and we need hardly add that the establishment of this Society forms a memorable epoch in the annals of life insurance. Like most great undertakings, it had to win its way against a formidable array of obstacles, and so long as these could be successfully overcome, it was not over scrupulous as to the means. Only four assurances were effected at the first meeting, and at the end of the next

*Quarterly Review, vol. xxxv. See also vol.

Ixiv.

three months the number fell short of thirty. To rebut the apprehended influence on the public mind, the 25th policy was announced as the 275th; much as a modern pamphleteer arrives at his third or fourth edition per saltum, at the cost of a trifling change in his title-page. How credit can be acquired or strengthened by the names of such lords and M.P.s as are frequently advertised as directors of companies, fairly passes our comprehension; but the practice is no modern innovation; for we find among the recorded proceedings of the Equitable a formal vote of thanks to Lord Willoughby of Parnam for the use of his name in sustaining the reputation of the Society,' in which he did not risk a sixpence. The very directors were so apathetic that it was found necessary to stimulate them by promising five guineas to the first twenty-one who should arrive at a meeting before twelve. The AttorneyGeneral had objected to granting the charter on the ground that the proposed terms, minutely specified in the Deed of Settlement, were not sufficiently high to guarantee solvency. They proved 30 per cent. too high, and the hasty distribution of the surplus profits subsequently introduced a new element of disorder into the finances of the Society, At length, under the able pilotage of Mr. Morgan, the Equitable cleared the shallows and made its way into untroubled waters, where it still floats, the leviathan of companies, like the Great Eastern among the small craft on the Thames.

If we may trust Mr. Francis, it is the boast of the Equitable that they were never driven into a court of law but once. The facts were these. A man named Innes had effected a policy for 1000l. on the life of his stepdaughter. She died under tragical and suspicious circumstances, and Innes produced a will, which appeared on the face of it to have been duly executed by her, declaring him executor and legatee. Its validity was contested, and he produced the two attesting witnesses, who swore boldly to all the required formalities, and would have gained their point, had not Innes insisted on calling a third to prove that he was present at the signature and attestation. This man's courage failed, or a feeling of compunction came over him at the last moment. Wan and ghastly he entered the witness-box, where his first words were 'My Lord, my name is Borthwiek: I am brother to the witness of the same name who has been examined. The will was not made on the Bridge Gate at Glasgow; it was forged by a schoolmaster in the Maze, in the Borough.'

Whilst the success of the Equitable was still doubtful, so large were the transactions of the existing offices that in 1765 the Government thought fit to demand all the unclaimed property lying in them. This demand was denounced as an attempt at confiscation, tantamount to the closing of the Exchequer by the Cabal under Charles II., and was eventually abandoned. The appropriation of unclaimed dividends to the public service evidently rests on different grounds.

The mania for speculating on the respective vitality of classes or individuals reached its acme about the middle of the eighteenth century, and twice compelled the interposition of the legislature. By 14 George. III., c. 48, it is enacted that no insurance shall be made on the life of any persons, or on any event whatsoever, where the person on whose account such policy shall be made shall have no interest, or by way of gaming or wagering.' The state of things which induced this provision may be illustrated by a few well-known instances. Policies were regularly opened on the lives of all statesmen and warriors of eminence. When Sir Robert Walpole was mobbed during the Excise Bill agitation; when the Duke of Newcastle was threatened with an im peachment; when Lord North looked drowsier than usual; when Lord Chatham's gout got worse; when the Marquis of Granby left London for Germany, the premiums were proportionally raised. The trial and execution of Byng were a perfect godsend to this description of insurers; but the strongest example of the lengths to which people may be demoralised by cupidity and the spirit of gambling was afforded by the arrival of the German emigrants.

In 1765,' says Mr. Francis, upwards of 800 Fields in the open air, without food. They had men, women, and children, lay in Goodman's been brought by a speculator from the Palatinate, Franconia, and Suabia, and then deserted by him. In a strange land, without friends, exposed by night and by day to the influences of the atmosphere, death was the necessary result. On the third day, when several expired from hunger or exposure, the assurance speculators were ready, and wagers were made as to the number who would die in the week. In the western part of the metropolis considerable feeling was exhibited for these unhappy creatures; in the country a charitable fervour was excited in their behalf; but indubitably the greatest interest was felt by those operators in the Alley and underwriters of Lloyd's Coffee-house, who had made contracts on their distresses, and speculated on their deaths. The benevolent spirit of England, however, soon put this speculation to an end, by providing the untortunate Germans with food, shelter, and the means of emigration.'

It is by no means a pleasant reflection frauds, we are assured, which now attend for a notability of our day that, the moment the loans of money to the spendthrift are his health begins to fail, a biographical nothing compared to the gigantic scale on notice is got ready by each of the leading which, under the name of annuities, they newspapers, to be let off the morning after were then carried on. The consideration the announcement of his decease-an event was rarely paid in money, and the dramatist was hardly guilty of an exaggeration when he represented a borrower as obliged to receive sundry hogsheads of treacle, a second-hand piano, ten chaldrons of coals, and a hundred tons of paving-stones. Α piece of plate, belonging to a jeweller and moneylender named Salvador, obtained an historical celebrity by constantly returning, like the ring of Folycrates, to its owner. We read that into whatever transactions of the kind he entered the piece of plate was introduced; invariably valued at 600l. to the recipient, and as invariably bought back for 707.

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which in their competitive eagerness, they do not always wait to verify. But it would be still more disagreeable to have one's chances of recovery quoted like the price of railway shares or consols. This inhuman sport,' says a well-informed writer, 'affected the minds of men depressed by long sickness; for when such persons, casting an eye over a newspaper for amusement, saw that their lives had been insured in the Alley at 90 per cent., they despaired of all hope, and thus their dissolution was hastened.'

many

Such were the practices which led to the Annuity Act of 1777, requiring the deed to be enrolled and the real consideration to be stated, as well as especially providing against the collusive or pretended payment of it in any shape. This Act could not and did not prevent the establishment of nume

long enough to enveigle a number of unwary purchasers, and, judging from the suicidal liberality of their terms, were never meant to last longer. The eyes of the discerning portion of the public were opened to the true character of these undertakings by the celebrated Dr. Price, whose eminently successful efforts to place the entire range of transactions connected with the probabilities of life on a sound footing, may be accepted as an ample compensation for the mischief he worked as a promoter of popular discontent.

The public opinion of the period sanctioned modes of making money which would be indignantly repudiated by the high official personages of our day. When the first Lord Holland was amassing from the profits of a subordinate office (that of Paymaster) a fortune large enough to allow of his paying 120,000l. for a younger son in a single year, without les-rous annuity companies, which lasted just sening his expenditure, little scandal was created and no questions were asked. Still, it is startling to be quietly told that, 'of sham insurances, meaning insurances without property on the spot, made on places besieged, in time of war, foreign ministers residing with us have made considerable advantages;' and that it was a well-known fact that a certain ambassador insured 30,000. on Minorca in the war of 1755, with advices at the same time in his pocket that it was taken.' Horace Walpole writes, I, t'other night at White's, found a very remarkable entry in our very remarkable wager-book. Lord bets Sir twenty guineas that Nash out lives Cibber. How odd that these two old creatures should live to see both their wagerers put an end to their own lives!' Another familiar instance was young Mr. Pigot's' bet of five hundred guineas with Lord March (afterwards Duke of Queensberry) that old Mr. Pigot,' his father, would die before Sir William Codrington. The dutiful son lost, but had the unblushing effrontery to contest the payment and bring the case before the Court of King's Bench, where it was decided against him.

The legislative restraint on direct gambling on lives gave a fresh impulse to the congenial trade in annuities, as the damming up of one channel simply turns the stream, whilst it continues to flow from the same abundant spring, into another. The

A list of all the Life Insurance Companies of England and Scotland in 1858, with the dates of their establishment, may be seen in the Encyclopædia Britannica,' article Insurance. They are 200 in number; 185 English and 15 Scotch. Of the English, according to this list, there were established before 1762, 7; from 1763 to 1810, 11; from 1810 to 1822, 15-of these 15 two are described as Irish; from 1825 to 1835, 10; 1835 to 184, 34; 1845 to 1850, 31; 1850 to 1855, 77.*

It is not apparent to a cursory observer why the progress was so slow prior to 1810,

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