with regard to
Doctor Keil the strangest reports were in circulation. He had been
described to me in Portland as a most inaccessible person, showing
himself extremely reserved toward strangers, and declining to give them
the slightest satisfaction as to the interior management of the
prosperous community over which he reigned a sovereign prince. The
initiated maintained that this important personage had formerly been a
tailor in Germany. He was at once the spiritual and secular head of the
community: he solemnized marriages (much against his will, for,
according to the rules of the society, he was obliged to provide a
house for every newly-married couple); he was physician and preacher,
judge, law-giver, secretary of state, administrator, and unlimited and
irresponsible minister of finance to the colony; and held all the very
valuable landed property of the settlement, with the consent of the
colonists, in his own name; and while he certainly provided for his
voluntarily obedient subjects an excellent maintenance for life, he
reserved to himself the entire profits of the labor of all and the value
of the joint property, notwithstanding that the colony was established
on the broadest principles as a communist association.

I had a great desire to see this original man--a kindred spirit of the
renowned Mormon leader, Brigham Young--with my own eyes, and, so to
speak, to visit the lion in his den. From Portland, where I was staying,
the colony was easily accessible by rail, and before leaving I made the
acquaintance of a. German life-insurance agent of a Chicago
company--Koerner by name--who, like myself, wished to visit Aurora, and
in whom I found a very agreeable traveling companion. He had procured in
Portland letters of introduction to Doctor Keil, and had conceived the
bold plan of doing a stroke of business in life insurance with him;
indeed, his main object in going to Aurora was to induce the doctor to
insure the lives of the entire colony--that is to say, of all his
voluntary subjects--in the Chicago company, pay, as irresponsible
treasurer of the association, the legal premiums, and upon the
occurrence of a death pocket the amount of the policy.

My fellow-traveler had great hopes of making the doctor see this project
in the light of an advantageous speculation, and accordingly provided
himself amply with the necessary tables of mortality and other
statistics. It had been carefully impressed upon us in Portland