ABSTRACT
SOCIAL insurance is a collective or co-operative methodof protecting individuals against the chief risks of life.It is grounded on the well-known fact that, while with reference to individuals the accidents of life are incalculable, in relation to groups they occur with remarkable regularity and may be foreseen and measured with a fair degree of exactitude. Thus, though it is impossible to predict which individual member of a population will die within the next five years, the proportion of the population which will die within that period can be stated with approximate accuracy. This is the principle on which the whole work of insurance is based. The possibility of foretelling and measuring events with regard to groups enables the risks to which individuals are exposed to be spread over a large number of persons, each of whom bears only a small proportion of the loss which falls in the first instance on a few.!
