handled millions of dollars yearly, and whose offices were gorgeous with many-colored marbles, and gilding, and inlaid wood, and rich carpets! And like their predecessors in the devouring of widows' houses for a pretence, they make long prayers. They, we say; but of course we do not mean all; for there are honest officers of life insurance companies, and even sound companies; but the number of both is shown day after day to be less and less; and when we think that those that we hear about are only they which have reached the end of their tether in fraud, perjury, and swindling, the prospect before us is one of the most disheartening that could be presented to a reflecting people. For remember, these defaulting, false-swearing life insurance and savings bank officers are picked men, and that their dishonest practices are from their very nature deliberate, slow of execution, and that in fact they have gone on for years. It is no clutch of drowning men at financial straws that we have here; it is the regular "confidence game" played on an enormous scale by men who are regarded as the most respectable that can be found in the whole community. They are vestrymen, and deacons, and elders, and grave and reverend signors, and these men have deliberately used and abused the confidence not only of the community in general, but of their friends and acquaintance, to "convey" in Nym's phrase, to steal in plain English, money which was brought within their reach because of their pretended high principle and their philanthropic motives. For, we repeat, it must constantly be kept in mind as an aggravation of these wrongs, that life insurance companies and savings banks are essentially and professedly benevolent institutions. They are, and they openly profess to be, chiefly for the benefit of widows and children. The man who takes to himself the money of a life insurance company or of a savings bank is not a mere thief and swindler; he robs the widow and the fatherless; he takes his place among those who are accursed of all men; and moreover, in all these cases he is a hypocrite of the deepest dye.