Temperance and Life Insurance.

Te Aroha News, Volume II, Issue 91, 28 February 1885, Page 5

Temperance and Life Insurance.

By far the most valuable testimony as to whether or no total abstinence tends to prolong life is that of life insurance statistic*, when attainable ; for actuaries have no theory to prove, but are obliged to seek exact truth in the intei e^t of business. The Whittington Life Insurance Company of London has for over twenty years dirided its policy holders into a temperance section, composed of all who will make application as tutal abstainers, and a general section, including all others ; and the manager in a ncent address gave some uf the results, which are very remarkable and instructive. The lives even in the general section are selected with as rlj.i 1 an exclusion a-» possib c of all intern perete persons, so the comparison is not between temperate men and sots, but between total abstainers and moderate drinkers ; and the death rate has in mx years been 45 per 1,000 in the temperance t-eciion, against 101 per 1,000 in the general section, with the difference increasing iris- tead of diminishing It is true that the lives in the f rmer section averaged thirty jears old at the time of insuring, against thirty-six in the latter, so that the ditfVrence is not quite so extreme as it Utoks ; bur, even j-o, 'hese stafci.-tics are startling, and justify the strongest statement* of temperance agitators. The manag-r ilso states that 12 per ct-nr of those who insure as total abs amr rs b lckslidc within ten year- ; that the temperance section iie off rather faster from con-umption and bronchitis than the other (we are lemind-d that Medford rum u.*ed to be considered in New England a prophylactic against consumption), but that on i h>3 other hand no one death has occurred in that section Irom disease of the liver, while it is olten a cause of death in the other.