ery true friend of honest life
insurance among insurance journals will demand that this
great business, of all businesses, must be kept free from
the contagion of corruption that has shamed finance, is
covering commerce with a blighting mildew, and threatens our
whole land with disaster as well as dishonor.

All this is preliminary to treating the case of the Prudential Insurance
Company. I want to say here that I do not know the corporation, any of
its officers, nor any one interested in the control or management of it,
and personally have never had the slightest connection with its
officers. I desire to prove through an outsider, some one of
unquestioned authority, that the great insurance companies are part of
the "System" and are engaged in manipulating the stock-market with the
funds their policy-holders put in their hands as a sacred trust. In so
far as the Prudential is concerned, rank and unsound as are the
transactions I am about to speak of, my investigations have proved to me
that this insurance corporation is only as a baby-carriage to a runaway
automobile compared with the three great representatives of the
"System," the New York Life, the Mutual, and the Equitable. Certain
critics have accused me of being unduly emphatic in my strictures on the
doings of the corporations of which I am treating. I will confess to a
secret amusement at being able, in this instance, to quote the language
of one of the most conservative insurance officials in America,
Frederick L. Cutting, for many years Insurance Commissioner for the
State of Massachusetts.

The Prudential Life Insurance Company has $2,000,000 capital stock. The
stock is owned and the company absolutely controlled by a few men. This
capital of $2,000,000 represents only $91,000 paid in in cash; the
balance has been derived from stock dividends; that is, profits that
have been made out of policy-holders. In addition to this enormous
amount, there has been paid ten per cent. in cash dividends annually, so
that for every thousand dollars paid in the stockholders hold $22,000 of
stock, upon which they receive annually $2,200, or, as Commissioner
Cutting puts it, "each year for ten years the stockholders have received
in cash dividends more than twice the original investment." I commend to
the policy-holders of the Prudential and other insurance corporations,
and to other honest men, these tremendous figures: every $1,000 invested
turned