meet the increased assessments beyond
a fair or normal rate.

To say that a company which does not adopt the first of these systems is
necessarily "doomed," as was asserted by a recent writer in your
columns, is to make a very extravagant claim at least, and one to which
the writer of this article would beg to demur. The objection to the plan
of step rates is that it is not popular with the people who are the
purchasers of insurance.

The company adopting the plan says, "We shall get rid of our undesirable
risks, those who are getting old, _because the rate of assessment_ will
be so high they _cannot afford to pay it_." The individual says, "I
don't like a plan by which I am to be increasingly burdened as I grow
older, and by which it is altogether probable I shall be compelled to
sacrifice the savings of years, and lose my insurance at the last."

This practical _freezing-out process_ has never yet been made popular;
perhaps it may be in the future.

It is objected to the second method that some will pay more for the same
value received than others, and it is therefore inequitable. But there
is some inequity in any plan of insurance, and this last has not the
element of injustice that would compel the aged and unfortunate to lose
the entire savings of years because of unavoidable increasing cost.

Assessments in most companies are graduated so that 800 or 1,000
policy-holders responding to a mortuary call would make a $5,000 policy
good for its face, and the income from $2,000,000 at five per cent would
pay twenty losses of $5,000 each.

Is it then an absurd statement that an assessment company properly and
honestly administered, with that amount invested, can be perpetuated for
all time?

Long before the reduction of membership to a number insufficient to pay
the face of the policy from direct assessments, the income from the
reserve would so lessen the cost that members could not afford to lapse
their policies, and new blood could always be secured.

ELIZABETH.[D]

A ROMANCE OF COLONIAL DAYS.

BY FRANCES C. SPARHAWK, Author of "A Lazy Man's Work."

CHAPTER XXIX.

ON GUARD.

It was nearly two weeks from the unsuccessful attack upon Island
Battery, the fifth and most disastrous that had been made. The morning
after it the soldiers, sore over their defeat, had listened sullenly to
the shouts of victory from within the French lines. Since then the
combined attack by land and sea, planned and eage