The life assurance controversy

Abstract

It was hardly to be expected but that an attempt to demonstrate the inconveniences arising from daily increasing competition in the business of life assurance should meet with resistance and reprobation. The large number of persons interested in novel undertakings of the character in question would naturally feel themselves aggrieved at statements which went to prove that such undertakings were mischievous because they could not be successful, and which sought to demonstrate their hopelessness of success by an expose of their actual condition; on the other hand, it is not much to be wondered at, that minds familiar only with a state of affairs so wholly different should regard with anxiety and alarm a succession of enterprises threatening not merely to encroach on their own field of operation, but, by a series of failures, to bring all alike into general suspicion and discredit. As in most other controversies, much allowance is to be made on either side. The interests of the two parties are probably not altogether antagonistic, but they can scarcely fail to come into serious collision unless placed under more carefully devised regulations than at present exist.