LIFE ASSURANCE.

Evening Star, Volume VIII, Issue 2516, 10 March 1871, Page 2

LIFE ASSURANCE.

To the Editor.

8m, —T was much pleased with your leading article of Tuesday evening, and am clad to see from it that you have the interests of your fellow colonists so much at heart. If people could but be persuaded that by patronising foreign industries, whether they be in the ships of manufactories, banks, insurance companies, or any others by which money is taken from the place, they are depriving the Colony of its very life blood, we should not hear people ocntinaally c implaining of the dullness of times and the want of money in the place. Yo.ir contemporary pointed out a few days ago that New Zealand paid upwards of two millions sterling annually to foreign capitalists in the shape of interest and dividends What a difference that sum would make in the rapidity of our progression were it possible to retain it here—and it is possible to retain a great part of it simply by patronising local in preference to foreign industr'es.

The Government Life Assurance and Annuity scheme has my heartfelt sympathy, and I feci sure it will yet prove to be one of the most successful and beneficial schemes introduced by the present Government. People who intend making that wise provision for the future, enabled by Life Assurance, should pr marily look to the security offered, and I maintain that they cannot have a better Jo al security than the guarantee of the Colonial Government. I attended the lecture given by the “ pleasant lecturer of an Australian Mutual Society,” to whom your article refers, and mu-t say that I was not a li'.tle disgusted at the clap-trap argu ments use I to induce people to give their money to that Society. He dwelt at consid rable length upon the advantages of the mutual system, but quiti omitted to tell his audience that by becoming members they incurred all the liabilities as well as sharing what profits the management chose to allot for distribution, and in case of mismanagement or failure from other causes, such liabil'ties mi.ht involve utter ruin.

I must crave pardon for trespassing at this length upon your valuable space, but trust this letter may lead to others upon this very important subject, the Government Life Assurance and Annuities Act, tending eventually to the welfare of our community.

i am, &e.,

CoLO.N IST.