LIFE ASSURANCE.

Westport Times, Volume VII, Issue 1057, 25 March 1873, Page 2

LIFE ASSURANCE.

To enlarge upon the benefits of life assurance would be almost a work of supererogation; as they have been placed so often and so prominently before the public of "New Zealand—especially since our paternal government has gone into the field to compete with mutual societies and private companies. There is no higher nor more binding duty, incumbent on every man, than to provide the means of support for those whom nature has made dependent on him. This has been recognised and urged by many of the most gifted men of our own generation and to quote from the writings of an illustrious photographer of a past age—- " Benjamin Eranklin ":—" A policy of life assurance is the cheapest mode of making a certain provision for one's family. Fhose who SBsent to the doctrine of Pope that the greatest knowledge of man is man, will readily admit its imfortanee, for it relates to everybody, f the poet had paused and added another couplet to the effect that, there is no branch of human knowledge with which mankind is so little conversant as with that which relates to man," —he would strictly have been within the bounds of truth. Life assurance should be one of man's important studies, and the absence of this knowledge and its advisablity is surely a pieces of culpable negligence. And truly the crimes of the unassured are great. Dickens once asked a man what was his object in working so hard; the man replied to make a provision for his family. Have you assured your life? No! Suppose, said Dickens, death should happen, the object of your life and hard work is lost; assure your life for £IOO, then go to work, and the object of your life is complete as far as in your power lies. The offices that are established for_ assuring our lives are generally divided into two classes—the proprietary and the mutual. The proprietary have earned so much credit ia England that may of the continental merchants have taken out policies with them. The mutual or co-operative system has very superior claims also, for we have the evidence of the old Equitable Society of London which coined money for all its members, and at the death of a policy holder who had been assured nearly sixty years, was, by the enormous profits which had accrued, enabled to

increase the claim of an original assurance of £IOOO to the magnificent figure of £BOOO, In addition to the large bonuses, the Equitable Society (mutual) had accumulated a substantial reserve fund amounting to eleven millions sterling. There is little doubt that mutuality or co-operation is the best guarantee for the success of any enterprise or undertaking, and when applied to life assurance must (if the reserve funds are religiously conserved) prove of paramount importance to the policy holder. The educated are called upon to advise the uneducated to assure their lives. "Whether the choice of office may be on the proprietary, the mixed, the mutual, or the government scheme. It is an act of grace, of charity, and of compulsion for the man who has not a sufficient provision made for his family to secure a subsistence for them when he, the bread winner, is taken away, and as that period remains an uncertainty to him, the uncertainty is the thing assured against. The Australian Mutual Provident Society have senc their advocate and lecturer, Mr W. A. Thompson, here, and the claims of this Society to favorable notice were well represented by a diagramatic lecture at the Masonic Hall, Westport, last evening.