years
of age should become a subscriber; that no subscriber should subscribe
less than L50--_i.e._, should purchase a smaller contingent annuity than
one of L15; that the annuity to every subscriber's widow, or other
person for whom the insurance was effected, should be at the rate of
L30 for every L100 of subscription. It was stipulated that subscribers
must be in good and perfect health at the time of subscription. It was
decided that all married men of the age of thirty years or under, might
subscribe any sum from L50 to L1,000; that all married men, not
exceeding sixty years of age, might subscribe any sum not less than L50,
and not exceeding L300. The Company's prospectus further stipulates
'that no person that goes to sea, nor soldier that goes to the wars,
shall be admitted to subscribe to have the benefit of this proposal, in
regard of the casualties and accidents that they are more particularly
liable to.' Moreover, it was provided that 'in case it should happen
that any man who had subscribed should voluntarily make away with
himself, or by any act of his occasion his own death, either by
duelling, or committing any crime whereby he should be sentenced to be
put to death by justice; in any or either of these cases his widow
should receive no annuity, but upon delivering up the Company's bond,
should have the subscription money paid to her.'

"The Mercers' operations soon gave rise to more business-like
companies, specially created to secure the public against some of the
calamitous consequences of death. In 1706, the Amicable Life Assurance
Office--usually, though, as the reader has seen, incorrectly, termed the
First Life Insurance Office--was established in imitation of the
Mercers' Office. Two years later, the Second Society of Assurance, for
the support of widows and orphans, was opened in Dublin, which, like the
Amicable, introduced numerous improvements upon Dr. Assheton's scheme,
and was a Joint-Stock Life Assurance Society, identical in its
principles with, and similar in most of its details to, the modern
insurance companies, of which there were as many as one hundred and
sixty in the year 1859."

[Illustration: CITY OF LONDON SCHOOL.]

Large sums were subscribed, but the annuities were fixed too high, and
the Company had to sink to 18 per cent., and even this proved an
insufficient reduction. In 1745 they were compelled to stop, and, after
several ineffectual struggles, to petition Parliament.