AFTERNOON SESSION.

The second session of the convention was called to order at 2 p. m. by President Dolph.

President Dolph-When I noticed the interest you were taking in the New York Commercial, I was inclined to suggest an intermission of half an hour, in order that you might do justice to the subject. I have received a letter I think proper to read at this time from Vice-President Kingsley of the New York Life, dated yesterday. He says:

I enclose herewith copy of the address which I had expected to deliver tomorrow before the National Life Underwriters' Association. I am obliged under the circumstances to ask you to read it. I find that it will be impossible for me to be in Hartford tomorrow. Will you be good enough to telegraph me on receipt of the letter so that I may know you have the text in hand. Very truly yours, D. P. KINGSLEY.

In view of Mr. Kingsley's inability to be present it was thought well that a representative of the New York Life Insurance Company should read his address, and we will therefor ask Mr. Corwin McDowell of Boston, agency director, to read his address. I have very great pleasure in introducing Mr. McDowell to you now. [Applause.]

Mr. McDowell-I appreciate the great disappointment that you all experience, for I share it too, in not having Mr. Kingsley here. He is a man of very strong personality; has a splendid voice, and is quite an orator. I have not had the time to read this over, I do not know what he has said, and of course you will have to put up with some shortcomings. But I will do the best I can, because I promised your worthy president I would do it. [Applause.] Mr. Kingsley's paper was as follows:

It seems to be a universal law that whatever survives, whatever grows, whatever becomes useful, must fight. I can recall no great reform, no great revolution, political or intellectual, that has not been attended with a severe struggle. This has been especially true in the establishment of moral and religious ideas. Every great religion has had to fight, not merely with pen and voice, but with sword; and, generally speaking, the men behind great moral and religious movements have not only been obliged to fight but have been willing to fight, have even sought conflict.

Once seized with genuine religious or moral conviction, man is apt to become a zealot. He wants to preach; and from preaching he wants to fight. He is moved to

force his ideas on to other people. For example: Once possessed fully of a belief in hell fire and the sufficiency of the Christian plan of salvation, how easy to reach the conclusion that in order to save an otherwise lost soul almost anyhing was justifiable. The horrors of the Inquisition, after all, sprang from a deep sense of duty. We can think of such men as being wrong; we believe they were frequently cruel; some of their acts in the light of later knowledge

seem

wholly infamous; but it is never possible to think of them as indifferent. In no act of their lives, in none of their relations to the world, are they presented as hesitant or doubtful or questioning. They are always in the attitude of conquest. Possessed of this ecstasy, every impulse of life drives the believer to exhaust himself in carrying his faith to the uttermost parts of the earth.

It is difficult for us to think of these forces as being operative in our day, and in our country. When searching for examples of men so moved, we naturally look in the early centuries, when men dared the unknown in order to establish their faith, or in a later period, when Europe was torn with religious strife, and the bloodiest and cruellest wars in all history were fought. Some of us may possibly let our minds run as near to the present as the date when Charles Darwin advanced his theory of evolution. I don't need to recall here the bitterness with which he was denounced. But to bring our quest up to the present hour, to realize that the same intense conviction which moved the early navigators and later reformers and stirred the church still lives in some form, and still moves the world, is difficult.

The tendency indeed is strongly against any such conclusion. We are rather disposed to believe that the giants are all dead. Under the inspiration of a daily

press, which, whatever its faults, is certainly very much alive, we are rather disposed to conclude that the only real and living things are official corruption, private scandals, betrayal of trusts, suspicions, bitter feuds, and jealousy. That real conviction and enthusiasm, devotion and self-sacrifice survive, outside of fugitive and individual instances, does not readily occur to any of us.

The great motive power of modern life, nevertheless, is really made up of these very forces. Their aim now is not glory, nor the triumph of any particular theory about the hereafter, nor money, as we are taught to think, nor power, as we easily believe. The contest is not to find a new world across the Atlantic, nor to convert the heathen, at least not the old-fashioned type of heathen.

Deeper than any of these dreams and ambitions, in the colossal enterprises of our day, lies the enthusiastic conviction that through modern methods and by the hands of the giants who wield them, we are surely passing up into a juster and a sweeter life.

In the thick of these plans and ambitions and struggles, all of which seek in some form to conserve and advance human life, is life insurance. Above every other form of business it awakens the fighting impulse in the soul of the true believer. It is a conviction first and then a business. This explains why with all its modernity life insurance so strongly suggests the atmosphere of an earlier time. The missionary spirit runs through every line of its vigorous literature. The preacher takes his text with the opening of every rate-book. The crusader survives in every great agency leader who marshals his forces against the citadels of indifference and ignorance. And at the same time, and just as unmistakably, the spirit of orderly government, of peace, of industry, of integrity, and of world-wide trade guides every finance committee.

While it would seem that life insurance and especially American life insurance must from its very constitution preach, must organize crusades, yet we find that it does so variously. Some companies preach almost not at all, indeed one or two employ no preachers and take much satisfaction therein. Others preach only to their immediate neighbors and never venture into fields on

which shines a different sun or in which a strange speech is used. Still others find no limit to the extent of that weakness or incompleteness in human life and society with which life insurance deals; it stops at no parallel of latitude or longitude. The cry for help which life insurance seeks to answer does not cease at state borders nor with the lines that delimit nations; it finds a way to express its need in every tongue and invariably asks for the same relief. The cry comes up from all the earth. It is a call that touches the heart and inflames the imagination. It offers not a golden reward for a short cut to India, but the immeasurable riches that belong to all those who have added something to the sum of human comfort. It comes too from all sorts and conditions of men; not alone from the sound and strong; but from millions who have their full measure of responsibility with less than a full measure of health and strength.

American life insurance has struggled mightily to answer these calls for help. The attempt has been splendid, the results glorious; although the attempt is not without critics, and the results are sometimes maliciously misstated and misconstrued. The answer to this call of society has been attempted in no spirit of adventure, with no desire for conquest; but seriously, soberly. If Energy has been at our right hand, Responsibility has walked hard by.

Let us consider what life insurance proposes to do; how it does it; what its moral responsibility is. We may thus be able better to understand the vigor and furious energy that characterizes the American life insurance

man.

Life insurance is, first of all, based on good morality, not simply abstract morality, or individual morality, but morality as a question of statesmanship, as a matter of practical administration in human affairs. From the moment when the soliciting agent opens his rate-book until the hour when the contract, made through his instrumentality, ceases to exist, life insurance fixes for itself the very highest standard of moral as well as legal responsibility. It presents itself as a haven, a city of refuge, a vast, half impersonal organization which professes to lift the individual somewhat out of the current hazards of existence and offers to solve some of the pres

sing and cruel problems of fate. It is not an overstatement to say that primarily life insurance approaches the individual much as the confessional dues. It asks the public to come, to give over into its keeping, almost without question, not only hopes, and plans, and responsibilities, but money. In this civilization, money has come to mean almost life itself. It means the product of daily toil, labor with the hands or brains. In an age when there is less and less belief, in a definite way, in the overshadowing care of Providence, and more and more conviction that a man must take care of himself and his own, money, that the poets sneer at and that the philosophers rail at, has come to be not only a center of power, but in the hands of modern co-operation almost the center of moral as well as material power. Then, adding an element of mystery as well as morality, life insurance agrees to do for those who pay over their money into its keeping, things which no man alone can do for himself.

In order to carry out a pledge which when made seems almost to assume the possession of more than human power, life insurance adopts methods which are neither mysterious, nor magical, nor unknowable, but entirly material and purely human. It necessarily plunges at once into the very center of modern activity and modern life. Its primary promise, while seemingly very wonderful, is simple enough, but before that promise is made good, life insurance has to touch and handle and know and master business and law and medicine and the most abstract reaches of the most exact of the exact sciences; it must know and be able to measure habitat and occupation and all the forces and facts that influence life, since life is its problem.

The moral responsibility of life insurance, considering what it takes from the people and what it teaches them to expect, comes very close to something superhuman in its quality. The material responsibility of life insurance is so built into the very fabric of all commercial faith that even a suspicion of its soundness cannot be tolerated.

We have then in this business as we interpret and practice it, an unprecedented combination of the moral and the material, of conviction and reason, of preaching and mathematics, of the zeal of the fanatic and the dis