tistics are not available for purposes of comparison without considerable labor on the part of the inquirer.
As a contribution to this subject, I propose giving the experience of the oldest, and, I believe, the largest, benefit society in North America, that of the Odd-Fellows, which has been in operation sixty-four years, and has a membership of about half a million. Though the society has branches in South America, Australia, Germany, and other places, yet the statistics I shall give will be confined to the membership in the United States and Canada—two countries whose circumstances of race, climate, and social customs are similar.
The membership of the Society of Odd-Fellows is confined to healthy white males, of the age of twenty-one and upward. When I say "healthy," I mean approximately so. In some localities a medical certificate of good health is required from every candidate for membership; and in all cases prima facie evidence of sound physical condition is a necessary prerequisite for admission. While, therefore, the society may not consist of lives as carefully selected as the policy-holders of an insurance company, yet they constitute a fair average of the healthy male adults of the Caucasian race. And any possible inferiority to life-insurance subjects in the matter of physical health will be more than balanced by the advantages resulting from the comparatively high standard of morals necessary to membership in a benevolent and moral organization.
The death-rate of this society for the last nine years has been as follows:
| YEAR. | Members. | Deaths. | Average. | YEAR. | Members. | Deaths. | Average. |
| 1873 | 414,815 | 4,013 | ·0096 | 1878 | 442,291 | 4,381 | ·0099 |
| 1874 | 438,701 | 3,889 | ·0088 | 1879 | 440,783 | 4,530 | ·0102 |
| 1875 | 454,689 | 4,543 | ·0099 | 1880 | 456,942 | 4,504 | ·0098 |
| 1876 | 456,125 | 4,317 | ·0094 | 1881 | 475,948 | 5,055 | ·0106 |
| 1877 | 448,019 | 4,284 | ·0095 |
The average rate for the period embraced in this table appears from these figures to be less than one in 100 (.0097). But the returns come from a very large section of country, with varying conditions, geographical and social, which may materially affect the mortality in special localities. It will be advisable, therefore, to individualize more closely. For convenience, we will classify the several States and Provinces into five groups. We will let the Eastern group embrace Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, Maine, Maritime Provinces of Canada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont; the Northern—Dakota, Manitoba, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Ontario, Quebec, Wisconsin, and Wyoming; the Central—Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, and West Virginia; the Southern—Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi,
