There is an ample field for both assessment and level-premium companies to prosecute their work. There need not and should not be antagonism between the two systems. Each will and should be criticised, but always in a spirit of fairness. To some extent modifications in both systems may be desirable, and doubtless a healthy competition will bring such changes to pass. Perfection is a quality of slow growth, but it _should_ be the aim of those who administer the far-reaching and sacred trusts of either system of life insurance. Such companies can undoubtedly be made permanent by providing for the entrance of new members at any time in the history of the company at a cost for mortuary assessments substantially as low as in the earlier history of the company. This may be accomplished in either of two ways:-- 1. By advancing the rate of assessment with advancing age, by what is called the step rate process, or,-- 2. By the accumulation of funds to meet the increased assessments beyond a fair or normal rate. To say that a company which does not adopt the first of these systems is necessarily "doomed," as was asserted by a recent writer in your columns, is to make a very extravagant claim at least, and one to which the writer of this article would beg to demur. The objection to the plan of step rates is that it is not popular with the people who are the purchasers of insurance. The company adopting the plan says, "We shall get rid of our undesirable risks, those who are getting old, _because the rate of assessment_ will be so high they _cannot afford to pay it_." The individual says, "I don't like a plan by which I am to be increasingly burdened as I grow older, and by which it is altogether probable I shall be compelled to sacrifice the savings of years, and lose my insurance at the last." This practical _freezing-out process_ has never yet been made popular; perhaps it may be in the future. It is objected to the second method that some will pay more for the same value received than others, and it is therefore inequitable. But there is some inequity in any plan of insurance, and this last has not the element of injustice that would compel the aged and unfortunate to lose the entire savings of years because of unavoidable increasing cost. Assessments in most companies are graduated so that 800 or 1,000 policy-holders responding to a mortuary call would make a $5,000 policy good for its face, and the income from $2,000,000 at five per cent would pay twenty losses of $5,000 each. Is it then an absurd statement that an assessment company properly and honestly administered, with that amount invested, can be perpetuated for all time? Long before the reduction of membership to a number insufficient to pay the face of the policy from direct assessments, the income from the reserve would so lessen the cost that members could not afford to lapse their policies, and new blood could always be secured. ELIZABETH.[D] A ROMANCE OF COLONIAL DAYS.