protection. This, notwithstanding the protection of the State laws, the
guardianship of the Insurance Department of the various States, and the
provisions of the company's charter and by-laws.

However impregnable may seem the safeguards which the law has built
round the administration of our great insurance companies, the fact
absolutely is that the honesty of "the one man" is the one potent
protection policy-holders may depend on. The others may be juggled with
as are the rules of the Stock Exchange, which say in thunder tones, "All
within our sacred walls is honest and honorable," when in reality if the
microbes of dishonor and dishonesty generated within Stock-Exchange
walls each busy week of every year should be collected and disseminated
throughout the land, they would give typhoid of the soul to our eighty
millions of Americans. So it becomes the duty of every policy-holder to
find out by such tests as he can apply, "Is 'the one man' who runs our
company an honest man or is he a dishonest man?" If "the one man" stands
their tests, if he emerges from their ordeal clean, strong, honest, as
they believed, then they may rest awhile in patience. But if he is
revealed as dishonest, then it behooves the policy-holders of that
company to take measures for the protection of their interests. The
welfare and happiness, perhaps the very lives of their mothers, their
wives, and their children depend on their action.

I was recently waited upon by an important man.

"Lawson, what are you doing in life insurance?" he asked.

"Giving facts about the life-insurance branch of a 'System' which is
foully plundering the people," I answered.

"What are you trying to do?"

"Educate the millions of life-insurance policy-holders to their present
peril; after they are educated, arouse them to quick, radical action."

"What are you going to do?" he asked.

"I am going to cause a life-insurance blaze that will make the
life-insurance policy-holders' world so light that every scoundrel with
a mask, dark-lantern, and suspicious-looking bag will stand out so
clearly that he cannot escape the consequences of his past deeds, nor
commit new ones."

"Have you figured the consequences to yourself?"

"Having no interest in what the consequences may be to myself in
performing what I have decided is a sacred duty, I have not."

"Let me show them to you. First let me ask, do you intend to confine
your criticisms to the New York Life Insura