manage the company.

"Therefore you will see that I fully comprehend that this power, which
you claim to be, and which undoubtedly is, the greatest on earth, is
absolutely, for all practical purposes, in the hands of three men, and
that any one who attempts to do anything contrary to what this power
allows will find himself opposed by practically unlimited money, which
can be used first to corrupt all sources of help, including State
insurance-law enforcers, and then to keep such corruptions from the
policy-holders by subsidizing the press. In other words, you see that I
fully comprehend that I, or any man or any body of men, would be
absolutely helpless in an attempt to correct present evils unless we
could do two things: First, show to the policy-holders of the great
insurance companies that they are absolutely in the hands and at the
mercy of 'one man,' and next, that this 'one man' is unscrupulous."

In other and different ways I had it forcibly impressed upon me that I
must go no further in connecting the life-insurance companies with
"frenzied financiering"; that while the "Standard Oil"-Amalgamated-City
Bank crowd might bide their time for reprisal and vengeance, the great
insurance companies must at any cost instantly squelch those rash souls
who dared to cross their paths. To all such warnings I replied that a
life-insurance company, especially great institutions with hundreds of
thousands of policy-holders, must be as far above suspicion as Caesar's
wife; that the security of the immense funds in their possession must be
as unassailable as the United States Constitution; but that immunity
from criticism could be secured only by honesty of purpose, honesty of
method, and honesty of results; and that I would follow "frenzied
finance" wherever it might lead, even if the exposure brought every
life-insurance concern in the country down to the ring-bolt of making
public confession of complicity. But with all my knowledge of the
"System's" weakness, I never dreamed of the condition of fatuity into
which the past few years of unbridled "frenzied finance" have plunged
its votaries. If the correspondence that follows here correctly
represents the purposes and the methods of great American life-insurance
companies, I ask my readers what quick, sharp, effective means should be
taken to call a halt and rescue the billions of the people's savings
before it is too late. And I ask all policy-holders in the great
insurance c