clerks have been agreeably employed in receiving, folding, and filing the reports of the various companies; in receiving applications for licenses from agents of foreign companies; in issuing such licenses; in furnishing printed copies of the charters of companies to all who apply for the same, and also copies of the reports of the companies. These duties are supplemented by that of collecting the fees for the various services, and by the composition of answers to letters of policy-holders of the most Delphic character. The head of the department, I suppose, is meantime fully employed in digesting the statements of the companies and preparing his annual report of their condition, to be presented to the Legislature, and afterward printed and bound in gilt covers, for distribution among his constituents. These reports are quite pleasant reading. You will find year after year faint and delicate suggestions as to amendatory laws, opinions that there is doubt of the legality of amalgamations, and other twaddle. Not a word, however, denunciatory of the frauds being perpetrated under the very nose of the department, and which every man in the State can see quite plainly but himself. Of the epistolary productions of the Superintendent, it is hard to speak. If language be given to conceal thought, how well it is used by the Department of Insurance. Complaints, charges, requests to examine--all are met so politely, so evasively, that while you feel you are being put off, and that your request will not be granted, you know not why you are refused. Thus the Department of Insurance ran its natural course. It became a storehouse of heaps of meaningless figures. The companies soon found that their mistakes were not corrected, and it became convenient to make mistakes. Gradually false statements grew out of exaggerated ones. Cash in bank would continue to represent money which had been lost by a bank failure. In one sense it was cash in bank--cash that would never again come out. Then money in the hands of agents is an item which could rise and sink with great facility. In some companies it grew to such proportions as to warrant the suspicion that pretty soon all the money of the company would be in the hands of agents, and very bad hands to be in they have generally proven, have these agents' hands. The books of the Continental Company show about a million of dollars in the hands of those gentlemen, with very little chance of any considerable portion of it ever getting into the hands of the receiver.