withdraw it when I please, subject, of course, to business rules, which have nothing to do with my standing as a citizen. The bank has nothing to say in regard to my loyalty or my honesty in other affairs. My money can not revert to the bank on outside ethical or moral grounds. But in life-insurance—a business in which more money is invested than in banking—the opposite rule has been, and to some extent still is, in operation.
There were a few companies, it is true, which rarely took advantage of their reserved right to mulct a family of money actually received, upon the plea of outside ethical delinquencies of the dead—which had nothing to do with his length of life—and there are companies, at the present time, which have voluntarily eliminated the greater part of these oppressive regulations and reserved rights from their forms of contract. But in many of the companies they still remain in full force, and in almost all there are improvements of a most important nature needed even yet.
In other words, while one or two companies have made their contracts, in large part, what contracts purport to be, a guarantee of good faith—that, if so much money is paid to them during a stated interval, they will return to the party insured, or to his heirs, a stated sum at a given time—there are still many which have not so improved their contracts, and are doing business in the old way, depending for success on the ignorance of their applicants in regard to the unfair conditions of the contracts which they sign. A few have left out most of the thousand and one ifs and ands and provideds of the old regime, and have at last undertaken to conduct this important and rapidly-growing business on strictly business principles, and the results have abundantly attested the wisdom of the new departure and indicate the advisability of still more liberal measures. A man may now, if he is careful and wise in his choice of a company, insure his life, or, if insured, he may have the temerity to die, without a fairly-grounded expectation of leaving his family a lawsuit for a legacy. He may also be reasonably sure that he is not placing his own reputation (after he is unable to defend it) at the mercy of a powerful corporation intent upon saving its funds from the inroads of a just debt. And I question if it is too much to say that, given enough money, a strong motive, and a powerful corporation, on the one hand, and only a sorrowing family upon the other, and no man ever lived or died whose reputation could not be blackened beyond repair, after he was himself unable to explain or refute seeming irregularities of conduct or dishonesty of motive. No man's character is invulnerable, and no man's reputation can afford the strain or test of such a contest. Millions of dollars have been withheld from rightful heirs by threats of an exposure—the more vague the more frightful—of the unsuspected crimes or misdeeds of the beloved dead.
Thousands of cases never known to the public have been "com-
