he always plays the game low down, and crooked. One day a neighbor, who had a long white beard, came home and the wife asked him where he had been; he said, "Playing poker with Jones." She said, "You are a dirty looking specimen; tobacco all down your beard, and whiskers dirty. Could you not have turned away your head to spit?" "Not with Jones, was the reply. [Laughter.]

Now, gentlemen, don't be a Jones. Let us, let the people, let the company at large, the policyholders and applicants so trust to your honesty that we can turn our heads away, knowing you are playing the game fairly and squarely. Don't try to deceive the medical department. There is where honesty pays. We ought to know you and know what you are doing. There comes in an application. Who has written it? Jones. I am suspicious of Jones, and I turn this risk down. On the contrary who else has written it? A man who has always acted honestly. A man who has always given to me the absolute facts in the case, consequently he is given the benefit of the doubt and the case is accepted. Then, too, agents try to make the worse appear the better risk. They will specially plead for a case, and I can assure you when an agent specially pleads for a case I look at that case very closely and very hard, expecting to find some flaws, and I almost always do. Gentlemen, don't try to bolster up a case by writing to the medical director, "This is a good Christian gentleman, a superintendent of the Sabbath School." I know the superintendents. I was one once myself. [Laughter.] And when you make an assertion make it of your own knowledge. Don't take anybody's hearsay. Write out what you know about this man. You write to me certain facts. I believe that you have investigated them. The facts turn out wrong, and then I find that you investigated it through somebody else, with somebody else's eyes, somebody else's judgment, and it is all wrong. It reminds me of a case which was before the courts in New Hampshire some time ago. The case depended upon the reputation of the deceased-a case of property. They brought one man up as a witness for the heirs and he was asked if he knew the reputation of Mr. Smith. He said he did. "What was it?" "Excellent." "Do you know anything

else about it?" "He was an example of all the Christian virtues." That seemed to settle it. The attorney on the other side said, "How well did you know Mr. Smith?" "Not very well." "Know him at all?" "No." "How do you know he was an example of all the Christian virtues?" "I read it on his tombstone." [Laughter.]

So, gentlemen, in a few words, this is from the standpoint of the medical director. You have no right to inflict a wrong upon the applicants for insurance, and the wrong which is so often inflicted upon them is when you know they have been previously rejected you cover up that fact and bring it in before another company, and there is another rejection. Every rejection which is piled up against an applicant makes it harder for him to secure insurance.

And then, too, there are often times of serving upon an applicant that form of policy which puts the most money into your pocket. Personally, I believe there should be a strict uniformity in commission, that there should be no difference whatsoever in the commissions which are given the agent for the different forms of policies. If a company wants to put a black mark against a certain form of policy it does not desire, cut it out. But in keeping that form of policy and all others, I believe it would run to the saving of a great many mistakes, of unloading upon a policyholder that which he has not applied for, if your commissions were uniform. Not one man out of twenty-five whom I examine knows what he is applying for. He only knows there is twenty years about it somewhere. He doesn't know whether it is endowment or twenty-payment life. You gentlemen know it, and it is that form usually, if you will excuse me, on which you get the most commission.

Now, gentlemen, what are the duties of a medical director? For whom are we working? The last person in the world is for ourselves. Whatever reputation we may have enjoyed, that has been earned, and that is a fixed fact whether for good or for evil. We are there to protect not the company but to protect the policyholder; and in protecting the policyholder who forms such an integral part of the company we are protecting your interests as well. Therefore it is very necessary for us to be very careful in scrutinizing the risks, in order that we

may save the mortality. The limit of mortality of actuaries has been put at half. Anything above that limit is a loss to the company. Anything that falls below it is a gain, and the more the gain the larger the surplus, the larger the dividends, which is a very important stock in trade with you in soliciting business. A unit, gentlemen, is a very small affair, and we hear it universally said in comparing ratios, "Oh, there is only a difference of one or half of one, between one and the other, and that does not count." But have you any conception of what a unit of mortality means? I will tell you our own experience. Last year in our industrial branch if we had had one more death in every hundred of our policyholders it would have represented a loss of $2,339,000. Is not there every reason why we have to be careful? It is better to make investigations before than after your mortality has come. Now, criticism is brought against medical officers of the company for delaying your applications. There is great competition. "I am afraid of this company; I am afraid of that company. I have seen another agent going around there. If I don't get my policy I am afraid I shall lose it." That is the cry. Now, gentlemen, as an example of how necessary it is to be careful, I give you the experience of a company a short time ago where an application came to them from the West with that same plea from the agent, "Absolutely necessary that policy should be returned by the next mail." On the application all there was which attracted attention was that this applicant had received a "cut on the arm last year. The application was in January. That, coming from a section of the country where there was a great deal of lawlessness, led to an investigation, and the investigation showed that the cut in the arm was in December, caused by a fight with an Indian. The Indian was after the man's scalp and they wanted the policy before he should be scalped. [Laughter.] The policy was not issued, but the Indian got his scalp. Now, gentlemen, that is no fancy case; that is real, and there are hundreds and hundreds of them, showing how necessary it is to be very careful in our scrutiny of risks in order to save the mortality.

Again, it has always been a wonder to me that while you would not criticise the lawyer to whom you have

gone for legal advice, and, having been given it, say to him, "Mr. Lawyer, you don't know your business; I know it better than you"; when you go to the financial expert in regard to investments and securities and he tells you what his advice is, you don't turn around to him and say, "Mr. Financier, I think you are all wrong"; but there is a tendency to say to the medical department of life insurance companies, "We know more about medicine than you do; you are all wrong and we are all right." Gentlemen, we would like to take your advice on such matters, but plainly enough—and I think you can appreciate it-there is engendered a feeling which is nothing more than a natural suspicion of many risks that come in to us. We believe that you are straightforward honest men, and it has always been a pleasure to me that years ago before a committee of our Massachusetts legislature when I heard the agent criticised and scoffed at, I got up and said, "Mr. Chairman, I will challenge you to point out any institution, any organization employing a like body of men as the life insurance with fewer black sheep than our representatives in the agencies. [Applause.] But you are interested parties. Suppose you go and loan money on a mortgage; would you take the say-so and the dictum of the owner of the property as to its repairs, as to its condition, as to the title, as to previous mortgages? No, you would not. It would not be careful business methods. You would make your own independent investigation. So with us. We are after the physical condition of the applicant and the business, and while we trust you, gentlemen, and believe in you, yet we must have independent investigation to show what the surroundings are of the applicant, of that form of business, before we accept the risk.

The medical examiner plays a very important part in the great business of ours, and my belief is that the usual medical examiner tries to save rather than to break down. It is the tendency of all of us, gentlemen, to save a risk. We don't want to reject it. Some agents think we are sitting in our offices gloating over the risks we reject. Why should we? Every risk we reject means a cost to the company, for which we get no returns. Don't you suppose we have some regard for you? Whittier says: "It is the heart and not the brain which

to the highest doth attain." And so it is, gentlemen. But I can assure you that while there is sentiment in this business, a great amount of it, we can't be influenced by pure sentiment alone; we cannot be guided entirely by our consideration for you, and the disappointments which rejection means to you. A lady said to me last night, "It does seem too bad, doctor, after my husband has worked a long time over a risk, to have him turned down on family history." I said, "Yes, madam, it does seem a shame that a person should be made responsible for the physical sins of his ancestors, but we have to do it!" "But," I said, "a medical director is a man who should have an elastic mind; he should be one who is perfectly willing to change his ideas with the advance of science," and it is in that respect today that we have changed greatly in respect to family history. Contagion enters into it largely, gentlemen. I do not mean contagion such as we have in scarlet fever or diphtheria. If there had been contagion of consumption as we speak of the contagion of scarlet fever and so forth, this world would have been depopulated long ago. But we do recognize that there is such a thing as contagion in tuberculosis, and it is the duty of every medical director to investigate every single case that comes into his office. We have our rule; we have our methods. Every tub should stand on its own bottom, and no medical director has a right to turn down a risk simply because the family history shows an undue prevalence of consumption, without an investigation, and sometimes, oftentimes, that family history will turn out not to be a blot upon the risk.

Now we medical directors should have broad catholic views. We should be expansive. We must be studious. We have got to keep abreast of the times, and in my experience of medicine I know of no more pleasurable part of a profession than this business of life insurance. We have got to be posted in all forms of medicine, all forms of surgery and in sanitary science, we should know business generally; we should know something about life insurance in general. We should be able to weigh each case on its merits, whether there is consumption involved and whether the business element is strong enough to overcome its doubtful character. I am painting, gentlemen, no Eutopian idea. This is not imaginative nor is