king restitution. In the act of
grabbing, however, the robbers fell out with one another, and, presto!
they are in the public square where all men, women, and children, cats,
dogs, and asses may see and hear as they gouge, bite, and accuse each
other of the vilest crimes.

These are the men in whose custody even now are the accumulations on
which you, Mr. Policy-holder, are depending to take care of your wife
and little ones, should you die. On the honor and responsibility of men
who in the past five years have "saved" out of salaries of $20,000 to
$100,000, private fortunes of millions, you must absolutely rely for the
safety of the billions of dollars of your savings. The future of the
helpless beings whom your hard daily labors provide with a livelihood is
in the hands of men who admit having expended $100,000 of your money to
provide a lordly and regal entertainment for a set of extravagantly paid
agents and solicitors who, spurred on by prodigal inducements, have
piled up huge amounts of new business on the company's books. I have
explained to you before what such business is worth, that the agent gets
so large a commission that he is practically in a position to accept
risks at far below their cost to the company, and that such business as
this is seldom renewed. The same men have been paying personal
secretaries, gardeners, and flunkies out of your earnings; they have
been feasting and traveling in private cars with large parties of the
New York flubstocracy at your expense; every possible extravagance they
have been guilty of by means of the revenues some of you have worked
fourteen to eighteen hours a day to gather in. Shame, I say, on such
contemptible thievery.

I cannot resist the temptation to pull back the slide from one episode
of the past. When my strictures on the three great life-insurance
companies first appeared, one of the vice-presidents of the Equitable,
Gage E. Tarbell, in writing to an inquiring policy-holder, said: "Pay no
attention to Lawson; he is only a reckless stock gambler, and every
sensible person knows that any man, no matter what his position might
be, who would do anything to cause loss to the class of people we
insure, must be a rascal." And this is the same man Tarbell, it is now
admitted by all the Equitable officers and investigating committees,
who, as soon as he saw the crisis coming in the affairs of the
Equitable, had his pal, President Alexander, pay to him $135,000, which