ABSTRACT
As an English policy-holder in the Mutual Life of New York, as well as in a British company of equal standing, I was interested in the storm that seven years ago burst upon the world of American life insurance. It had by no means abated when early in 1906 I chanced to find myself in New York. I could not, indeed, have timed my visit more happily had I crossed the Atlantic for the express purpose of witnessing the American public in one of its periodical fits of morality. “A Frenchman or an Englishman,” says Mr. Dooley, “cleans house be sprinklin’ th’ walls with cologne; we Americans chop a hole in th’ flure an’ pour in a kag iv chloride iv lime.”1 New York in the early months of 1906 reeked of chloride of lime. Largely, it may be remembered, as the result of a strife of factions and personalities among the directors of the Equitable, the New York State Legislature appointed a committee to investigate the affairs of all the New York insurance companies, and especially of the “Big Three” – the Mutual, the Equitable, and the Life. These three organizations had at that time (in round figures) 2,150,000 policy-holders, their admitted assets amounted to $1,250,000,000, their outstanding insurances to $4,975,000,000, their premium incomes to over $205,000,000, and their combined surpluses to nearly $200,000,000. Their size and power and wealth, the immensity of the interests committed to their care, and the fact that all three companies had expanded beyond the limits of the United States and were doing a considerable business in England and throughout Europe, combined to rivet a world-wide interest on the abuses that were brought to light.
