reciation of real estate. (See Massachusetts Report, 1902, pages
158-159.)

This illegal suppression of most important transactions, directly
affecting, as will be seen later, the interests of policy-holders, would
have remained a sealed book but for the careful audit of the
Massachusetts Department, which revealed the fact, unnoticed by that of
any other State (note in this one instance the boasted careful
supervision and boasted double and triple auditing of all accounts
before publication!), that the item "Agents' Balances," amounting in
the preceding year to $1,527,123, had disappeared altogether from
assets. This led to a prompt request from the Massachusetts Department
for explanation.

The honorable business men of the New York Life, who pay out so many
hundreds of thousands of dollars each year advertising the fact that
they are sitting up o' nights to find new ways to acquaint the
policy-holders with the innermost secrets of the company, finding there
was no avenue of escape from their dilemma, quickly realized that the
Massachusetts Department meant to have the facts, and publish them, too.
Their own "faked" report was already before the public in the published
reports of two departments, those of Connecticut and New York.

There was but one course open to avert the terrific scandal that was
inevitable upon publication of the Massachusetts Report, and that was to
head off and forestall adverse comment and criticism, as far as
possible, by making a clean breast of it. No time was lost in preparing
a letter of explanation to the Department. This answered the purpose of
the Department, which did not care to press the matter, having
accomplished its main object.

Now for the moral, or the iniquity, rather, of the preceding, the wrong
to policy-holders, which has been so completely ignored and passed over
by the insurance press and all hands: Either the company had, as at
least supposedly it has in all such cases, ample security for its
advances to agents in the pledges of their renewal contracts, or it had
not. On the former hypothesis, that $1,900,000-odd was a sound and valid
asset, earning a good rate of interest. On the latter, the company
simply squandered this amount of trust funds belonging to its trusting
policy-holders in its mad rush for business at whatever cost; or--In
either case the money has gone from sight so far as any sign or
indication appears to the contrary since.

And before leaving thi