ABSTRACT
If the reader would permit us, for a moment, to try to be jocular, we might say, that assurance and insurance are two of the prime characteristics of the present age. They meet one everywhere – jostle us on the street, stare at us from the walls and the shop-windows, accost us on the Exchange and in the market-place, and twinkle on us in prospectuses, bills, and popular periodicals. Everybody, everywhere, has the assurance to insure us. The haberdasher, with a winning smile, and in spite of all the cross-grained influences of what Hood calls “counter-irritation,” 1 assures his fair customer of the unquestionable quality of some worthless goods. The auctioneer, ere he makes his decisive tip with his hammer, assures and insures the lot to the company. The quack assures you, that if you only take pills No. 1, that then pills No. 2 will ensure your life. The joint-stock jobber assures you that shares will rise, and that then he can insure you in a prime per-centage. And – to vault right into our subject – numberless busy actuaries, “closing rivets up,” 2 call upon us, in a thousand ways, to listen to the tempting proposals of their several companies, assuring us and insuring us, of unquestionable security, great advantages, and low rates of premium; and, appealing to all the softer feelings of our nature, ask us, if we can be so inhuman as to run the risk of leaving our wives helpless widows, and our children desolate orphans, when, by a small annual payment, hardly missed from our current expenditure, we may live happy, while we live, in the assurance of safety, and die, if we should die suddenly, without that drop of gall in our death-cup – the conviction that a young family is left destitute!
