rates, they are much too shrewd to take their lives at random. They pick the strongest and healthiest, rejecting all else, and make them pay premiums founded on the contingency tables of mixed lives. This, therefore, is also somewhat in favour of the calculations of the new companies. But there is another important item to be regarded;--the value of money. The funds of all the offices from 1760 to 1815 were bought when Consols were low, and the price of the Three per Cents. ranged from 47-1/4 to 97. During the war there was an eager demand for money. Exchequer bills, mortgages on large landed estates, allotments of new loans, were all favourable modes of investment. Even since money has been plentiful, the large capital of the old offices has enabled them to gain a higher interest, because money lent in large sums for a lengthened period will always command a higher rate of interest than small sums for a short period. Thus one old office announces, in its balance-sheet, that it is receiving 4-1/2 per cent. on its investments; and probably other offices, with similar funds, are similarly fortunate. The new offices may find a difficulty in this which they have not estimated, and which may materially interfere with their profits; although it is more than probable that even this objection is over-rated, because there are principles which govern the interest of money, quite as certain as those which govern life, and because the rate of discount of the Bank of England is no safe criterion to those who are out of the money market. Their anxiety to forward their interests will also induce them to exert themselves, and the activity which pervades business when discounts are low, may more than compensate for a diminished interest. There is, however, another feature which must always act somewhat in favour of the old offices, and that is, their liberality in peculiar cases. Rich and well-established companies do not always confine themselves to arithmetical calculations, and they often employ the rule of right in paying demands which no court of law could compel; partially, it may be, from proper feeling, but principally from an “enlightened selfishness.”