We have no disposition to detract from the excellent results accomplished, and perhaps the severest criticism that can be made upon a system embracing such beneficent possibilities is that it has failed so disastrously to realize them in such numerous instances. While it has carried relief and comfort to many families whose wage-producers have been taken from them by death, it has bitterly disappointed many more who had made it their dependence for such a time of need. While it has encouraged many a poor man to heroic self-sacrifice in the effort to save the premium required from his scanty wages, it has too often absorbed the products of his toil, and left his children to cry for bread. Such results have been reached sometimes by extravagant and incompetent management, and again by dishonesty and gross betrayal of important trusts. The preposterous claim is frequently made by the advocates of level-premium insurance, when contrasting it with assessment insurance, that patrons of the former system may pay their money with the absolute certainty of securing the benefits for which they pay, while patrons of the latter are placing their hopes upon a rope of sand. We do not hesitate to assert that more money has been actually lost to the people by the collapse of a single level-premium life company that we might name than by all the failures combined that have ever occurred in assessment companies in this country; because, in assessment companies, for the most part, a fair equivalent is rendered from year to year, while in the former large over-payments are required upon the promise of future returns. There have been in the United States some eight hundred level-premium life companies, only about fifty of which are now in existence. It is unnecessary to recall the disastrous ending of such companies as the "Continental" and the "Knickerbocker." It is well known that the former was at one time receiving not far from half a million of dollars annually in premiums through its Boston agency alone, and that the latter, in the midst of seeming prosperity, collapsed so suddenly that millions of dollars of supposed assets disappeared beyond recovery. The history of the "Charter Oak," with its more than ten millions of assets at one time, its subsequent compromise with its policy-holders at sixty-five cents on the dollar, and its now possible passage into the hands of a receiver,--that functionary at the tail end of a life-insurance company that has so often been the "bourne" whence few dollars have ever returned to the pockets of the unfortunate policy-holder,--is too well known to require rehearsing here. Yet the assertion is brazenly made that level-premium companies alone give insurance that insures; that there is no safety in any other form of insurance, and that assessment insurance, disbursing its millions to the families of our land, is but a temporary craze that will soon pass away.