This dispute, which provoked a commotion almost inconceivable to us, was concerned with the sex of the Chevalier d’Eon. We are apt to take historical events for granted, neither marvelling at their strangeness nor speculating upon the manner with which contemporaries received them. Can you imagine a Frenchman of distinction, coming to England upon a confidential mission, quarrelling with the Ambassador of his country, accusing publicly this or that statesman of treachery, and finally arousing the most widespread doubts as to whether he was a man or a woman? Yet this very thing did happen to Charles Geneviève Louise Auguste d’Eon de Beaumont, and we hardly need to be told that the assurance brokers of the City of London found this spicy problem very much to their taste. Policies were opened by which it was undertaken that, on payment of fifteen guineas down, one hundred should be returned whenever the Chevalier was proved to be a woman. The Chevalier, after some passing pretence of indignation, graciously allowed, that at a certain Coffee House, at the hour of noon, he would satisfy all whom it might concern. As may be easily imagined, the assurances were immediately and greatly increased, and there should be no reasonable doubt that the Chevalier got in return for his condescension what nowadays we should call a “rake off.” At the appointed hour, the Chevalier appeared in the uniform and the decorations of an officer, and, claiming to belong to the sex whose dress he wore, challenged anyone present to disprove it with sword or cudgel. This was not the sort of solution of the problem which commended itself to the citizens of that day, and all the more, since the Chevalier was known to be remarkably expert with the small sword. The crowd of underwriters and brokers dissolved, leaving the great question of the day unanswered. An action was brought in the Court of Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, who gave the decision to which we have already referred. An Act had already been passed that insurance made on the life of any person on the account of another who had no interest in that life should be void. Lord Chief Justice Mansfield laid it down that the same principle should be held even when the policy was not a policy on life. It is obvious that the system of insurance, once it became general, would give opportunities to the ingenious criminal. The cases, however, of such frauds or such attempted frauds are, comparatively to the vast volume of insurance business done, astonishingly few. Still fewer present those conflicts of emotion--those struggles between ill-assorted natures thrown together in the jumble of life--which alone give interest to the study of crime. Most of the insurance frauds represent no more than sordid efforts by mean men or women. One or two cases, however, do stand out by something especial in the way of audacity or imagination on the part of the chief criminal.