And the worst of this condition of affairs with respect to the Insurance Department is that it is a delusion and a snare. If there were no supervision, people would exercise their judgment themselves, uninfluenced by annual reports and all the apparently officially recognized, columnar, battalions of carefully disposed statistics. Then instead of producing certificates with the departmental seal authenticating solvency, the life insurance solicitor would be forced to prove his company entitled to credit by other and more convincing arguments. Naturally enough, the plain people suppose that when the State undertakes to regulate the business, it will do the work which it undertakes well and honestly. It has in fact done neither. While saying to the country, our companies are under strict supervision; they are obliged to make annual reports; and if there is any item in that report which leads the Superintendent to believe the company should be examined, it is immediately done, and we permit no company to continue in business unless it has assets enough to reinsure all its outstanding contracts. That is what in effect the State of New York says. How far otherwise are its actual doings let the history of the Continental and the Security answer. The receiver of the first named says it has been insolvent for five or six years, and insurance people gravely suspected that for some time. As to the Security, any boy in a life company will tell you that its absolute insolvency has been well known for at least two years to all persons having any knowledge of the business at all, who have read their annual reports. Nevertheless the department did not interfere. The Continental let it be understood in California that they were insolvent, so that they could buy in their contracts at a low price. At home they keep up the appearance of solvency, go through the solemn farce of making out reports and filing them in the department, showing a surplus of nearly a million, when in fact there was a deficiency of two millions. What an efficient department! What a splendid system! How careful of the interests of the public! What a fatherly State to its expectant widows and orphans! Just here is the vice of the whole system. Relying on the care of the State officers, the policy-holder takes out his policy and continues his payments year after year. Relying on a broken reed! Can it be conceived possible that the real owners of two hundred millions of dollars would abandon to directors the entire charge of their interests and the interests of those dear to them, unless they were inspired by faith in that governmental supervision which they were led to believe would be effectual to protect their interests, and to make safe the provision which they had made, not for themselves, but for those helpless ones whom it is the duty of the State to care for, and the boast of our system of jurisprudence that it protects with jealous care?