premiums, of large commissions. With laws so imperfect, with no
provision for examining the commercial condition of a company, it is not
strange that State supervision should gradually fade into an empty form.
It is true the department has been for some years kept in full apparent
efficiency. There has been a respectable head, and a very full body of
clerks duly appointed at the suggestion of members of the Senate. These
clerks have been agreeably employed in receiving, folding, and filing
the reports of the various companies; in receiving applications for
licenses from agents of foreign companies; in issuing such licenses; in
furnishing printed copies of the charters of companies to all who apply
for the same, and also copies of the reports of the companies. These
duties are supplemented by that of collecting the fees for the various
services, and by the composition of answers to letters of policy-holders
of the most Delphic character. The head of the department, I suppose, is
meantime fully employed in digesting the statements of the companies and
preparing his annual report of their condition, to be presented to the
Legislature, and afterward printed and bound in gilt covers, for
distribution among his constituents. These reports are quite pleasant
reading. You will find year after year faint and delicate suggestions as
to amendatory laws, opinions that there is doubt of the legality of
amalgamations, and other twaddle. Not a word, however, denunciatory of
the frauds being perpetrated under the very nose of the department, and
which every man in the State can see quite plainly but himself. Of the
epistolary productions of the Superintendent, it is hard to speak. If
language be given to conceal thought, how well it is used by the
Department of Insurance. Complaints, charges, requests to examine--all
are met so politely, so evasively, that while you feel you are being put
off, and that your request will not be granted, you know not why you are
refused.

Thus the Department of Insurance ran its natural course. It became a
storehouse of heaps of meaningless figures. The companies soon found
that their mistakes were not corrected, and it became convenient to make
mistakes. Gradually false statements grew out of exaggerated ones. Cash
in bank would continue to represent money which had been lost by a bank
failure. In one sense it was cash in bank--cash that would never again
come out. Then money in the hands of agents is a