A SUGGESTION FOR THE LIFE OFFICES.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIV, Issue 5641, 29 April 1879, Page 3

A SUGGESTION FOR THE LIFE OFFICES.

• (From the Australian Insurance Record .) Fire insurance companies contribute with more or less liberalty to the maintenance of brigades and salvage corps. Marine offices keep up a staff of surveyors, and when a shipmaster performs some feat of seamanship, which saves them from threatened loss, they are not slow to recognise his merit in a substantial way. But what, we venture to ask, do life assurance societies contribute, in the direction of sustaining the class of risk they cover? We are quite unable to reply to ourown inquiry. Given a life, value to them for £SOOO or £IO,OOO, is it not worth while to do something to keep it in a premium-paying state, and to retain as long as possible the amount of the policy in an interestbearing condition ? Startling from these premises, we submit that it is worth the consideration of life assurance companies whether it would not be to their advantage to afford some practical aid to such organisations as health and humane societies. At its last monthly meeting the Victorian Humane Society resolved “ t© grant an annual certificate for proficiency in swimming, and in the knowledge of the means of saving life from drowning, and of restoring the apparently drowned, to such public and private schools as might be approved, at which the average attendance was at least 100. A letter was read from the police department stating that a large number of handbills and larger placards, giving directions for the treatment of snakebite, sunstroke, &c., forwarded by the society,, has been sent to all the police station in the colony. The secretary was instructed to send a supply of the same handbills .to all the municipal and shire councils. The secretary reported. that the new life-buoys ordered at the. last meeting had been erected at various places on the Yarra.” Here are set forth a number of aids tending to the preservation of human life, of which a certain proportion is insured in our various life offices. As the prolongation of these lives is of momentous importance to the life assurance companies, it is surely, worth their consideration whether they should not, on the ground of their own immediate advantage, offer prizes for proficiency in swimming, and small rewards for saving lives—-even if it were only for assured lives. And again,' there are the death-averting efforts made by the Health Society, which might very well obtain some substantial recognition and aid from the life assurance societies.