“Keep still! I’m doing you a favor, but I’ve got to tell you first what a libel you are on the average human being. The law that you want to break was made for the protection of just such financially insignificant people as you. It prohibits giving rebates in any form on insurance premiums and provides that the acceptance of such a rebate by the policy-holder shall invalidate his policy, and that the giving of such a rebate by a company or any of its agents shall subject the company to a fine. Do you understand?” “Sure; but who iss to know?” Murray was discouraged, but he had set out to drive a lesson home to this dull-witted fellow who thought he was smart, and he valiantly held to his task. He could feel nothing but contempt for the man, but he had become rather interested in convincing him how foolish he was. Besides, Murray was a bitter opponent of the rebate evil in all lines of business—every one knows how it fosters monopoly—and he attacked it whenever and wherever he could. “If rebates on insurance premiums were not unlawful,” he asked, “do you think people of your kind are the ones who would get them? Well, hardly. The millionaires, the rich men, the men who take out the big policies, would get them, and you little fellows would pay the full price, just as you do wherever else the rebate evil exists. This law was made to protect you, and you want to break it down. Well, I suppose there are others just as bad. The men for whose benefit a law is made frequently insist upon playing with it until they drop it and break it, and then they wonder why the splinters won’t do them as much good as the original law.” Having warmed up to a subject that interested him, Murray was talking for himself now. Adolph could understand in a general way what he meant, but many of the remarks were entirely beyond his comprehension. “Look at it in another way,” Murray went on. “As a speculation, the insurance rebate is a mistake. The man who gets or accepts a rebate is taking a risk. ‘Well,’ he argues, ‘so is the man who buys wheat or stocks or undeveloped real estate of problematical future value.’ Quite right; but when you speculate you want to be sure that your probable or possible profits bear a fair proportion to the risk and your possible losses. It’s all right to make a secured loan of one thousand dollars at five per cent., but when you put your thousand into a scheme where there is a chance of losing every cent of it, you also want a chance of making a good deal more than the legal rate of interest. Russell Sage is said to look as closely after the small profits as the large, but Russell would shy away from an investment—a real safe _investment_—that promised only a ten cent profit on five dollars; and if it were a _speculation_, where he might lose the whole five, he would want to see a possibility of winning at least half as much. The man who accepts an insurance premium rebate is going into a