In the order of history, life insurance followed upon marine, and fire insurance upon life. At first sight, to anyone who forms in his mind anything like a vivid picture of the crowded wooden houses, the medley of thatched roofs, which made up a mediæval city, the order may seem strange. One might imagine that the danger of fire, and the necessity of guarding against its widespread terrors, would be ever present. But it is necessary to remember that, as before the Great Fire went the Great Plague in the sequence of facts, so, also, in the sequence of loss, mortality and damage, fire limped behind disease. The mediæval house in a dry summer was tinder to a spark, but winter or summer it was a place of unclean rushes with little, if any, sanitation. Readers of the “Young Visiters,” will recollect that the heroine put some “red ruge” on her cheeks because, as she declared, she was pale owing to the drains of the house. The demand for “red ruge” must have been very extensive in mediæval London. There was a disease called the “sweating sickness,” which carried off inhabitants in a few hours. The Plague had visited the City many times before the winter of 1665, and was to visit it afterwards. There was a violence in the ordinary conduct of life, such as you may know after the conclusion of any great war. Medicine was in its infancy. If your child had scarlet fever, you wrapped it up in a scarlet cloth; if you had the stone, as likely as not your Doctor would make a disgusting plaster, of which the chief ingredients were headless crickets and beetles, and would rub you with it; whilst the Clergy, into whose hands much of the duty of healing the sick naturally fell, were forbidden by the Pope to shed blood under any conditions whatever. Where the Great Fire barely slew a hundred, the Plague carried off its thousands. It was natural, therefore, that men’s minds should be set on compensations for the loss of life, before they reached the idea of compensations for the damage done by fire. The ancient Saxon Guilds did, in fact, attain the rudiments of life insurance in their provisions for the payment of funerals, and for the maintenance of dependents left in distress by the death of a member of the Guild. Life insurance, indeed, would no doubt have long since become as established a fact as the insurance of ships, but for one fatal difference. You knew the value of the ship; you knew the price which its cargo would fetch in the market; you were upon solid ground. But with regard to life you had nothing whatever to go upon. There were no figures by which you could calculate the probabilities of its duration. Life insurance was the merest gamble, and, even so late as the days of Charles the Second, you could buy a Government annuity for ninety-nine years for a cash payment equal to fifteen and a half year’s annuity.