s point, it may be well to ask, "Has the New York
Life Insurance Company altogether discontinued these advances to
agents?" If not, how and where are they accounted for? An answer may be
found, possibly, in the comparatively meagre underwriting profits of the
company, growing relatively smaller and beautifully less with each
succeeding year. I say it may possibly be found here, because this is
the only place the item could be buried; but I am reasonably sure that
it is not buried here, and that these advances to agents are being
continued on a scale as large as, or larger than ever, for the agents
could not have been shut off and the business increased at one and the
same time.

Again, during the last two months of 1904, or at a time when my story,
"Frenzied Finance," began to get in its work all over the world, I
received from many quarters information that the Big Three had
instructed their leading agents to get in a great lot of new risks "at
any cost," so that the total business for the year would show such
increase as to discredit my claim that the policy-holders were getting
"scared." I watched the game with much interest, knowing that bunco
would out in time, by whomever worked. During these months I read from
week to week of this great policy, or that record-breaking risk just
landed by this or that agent. One in particular made me chuckle at its
transparency. A certain friend of the New York Life, a Wall Street man,
"has just taken out a $2,000,000 policy." About the same time I began to
receive information of the remarkable offers that were being made to
prospective customers, offers which probably meant an indirect rebate of
perhaps the full first year's premium; and I got to thinking and
reaching back into my memory-box, and I raked out a number of instances
of the same kind of offers which had been made to me in the past, and I
ruminated to myself how all this was possible; for even if the Big Three
were bold enough to get around the law against such practices, it
puzzled me how they could pay to their agent the big cash commissions
that new business called for. Presently as I waited I read, as did the
rest of the world, the big January full-page advertisements of the New
York Life to its policy-holders, calling their attention to the increase
of $15,000,000 new business over the year before. Then I took another
think and did a little work, with the following result:

A JOLT FOR THE NEW YORK LIFE

The