_Accidents_ that are _preventable_, caused by carelessness, laziness, and ignorance, cost more money, suffering, and life than viciousness and incendiarism, in the ratio of 3 to 1. Every man who builds a mill, manufactory, or a business block, makes his own rate of insurance. A slight variation in the construction of a building, the omission of certain details, the wrong location of hazardous machinery or materials, or the neglect of cleanliness and order, may very seriously affect the _fire hazard_, and consequently the _rate_ of insurance which must necessarily attach to the property. The _Fire Losses_ in the United States amount to $125,000,000 per annum, and the great mass of this enormous loss is chargeable to bad construction of buildings, the lack of necessary apparatus for extinguishing fires, and carelessness in the management of property. The _unavoidable_ losses are few in number; the _avoidable_, many. Insurance companies _restore no value_, _repair no loss_; they can only _distribute_ the loss throughout the community. Careless, ignorant, annihilative, is the term to be applied to 75% of the fire losses. The destruction of life by accidents, where immediate death follows, in the United States is large; but, in comparison with those that assist in shortening life, they are about in the ratio of 1 to 100. Only such persons as have undoubted _integrity_, coupled with order, cleanliness, and carefulness should be allowed to insure their property, and this should be restricted by law. A certain sect in our population that now have to be charged from 50 to 100% more for insurance than other people, should be stricken from the list of the insured, until they have by personal action abolished this difference in risk.