ies, in each of which from one to a dozen
smaller companies have intrusted their local underwriting to some
agency firm. There too are the offices of the world's leading
reinsurance companies, most of them German or Russian, who accept their
business not from agents or property owners, but entirely from other
insurance companies. There are the elaborately equipped offices of the
local inspection and rating bureau maintained by all the companies, and
there are the offices of the dealers in automatic sprinklers, fire
alarms, extinguishers, and hose. And throughout the whole district the
buildings are honeycombed with the almost countless brokers--from firms
who transact as much business as a large insurance company down to
shabby men who have failed to succeed in other lines and who eke out an
existence on the commissions from an account or two handed them in
friendship or in charity--all of them the busy intermediaries between
the insurers and the insured.

From morning till night these insurance men throng William Street, most
of them representing the brokers who feed the business into the great
machine. And it is no wonder that the street is thronged, for the
amount of detail requisite for every insurance effected is surprisingly
great. Let us suppose that Brown, owning a building, desires to insure
it. He sends his order to Jones, a broker who has solicited the
business. Jones's clerk enters up the order and makes out a slip
called a binder, which is an abbreviated form of contract insuring the
customer until a complete contract in the form of a policy can be
issued. This binding slip is given to a clerk called the placer, whose
duty it is to place the risk, or in other words to secure the
acceptance of the insurance by some company or companies. The placer
then goes into the street, returning when his binder is completed by
the acceptance of the amount desired, the name of each company with the
amount assumed and the initials of its representative being signed in
the spaces left for that purpose. Forms must then be prepared by the
broker to suit the conditions of the risk and delivered to the
companies, the rate schedule must be scrutinized to see whether in any
way a lower rate can be obtained, and as soon as possible the policies
themselves must be secured and delivered to the assured. The premium
must then be collected and remitted, less the broker's commission, to
the companies. And the broker's duty