This practice of paying differences is, as I understand it, much rarer, however, than the actual delivery of the stocks or bonds mentioned in the contract. The courts have of late years, with great uniformity, dealt with these contracts with the disposition to uphold and maintain them, and have discredited the defence of their being of the nature of a wager, and have held the contracting parties to their agreements in the same manner as in every other contract for which a reasonable consideration had passed. The decision of the Courts of this State, of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Illinois, and in the Federal tribunals, where, in one form or another, these contracts have been the subject matter of examination, have been so uniform in that direction that we can now regard this as settled law. It was only in the infancy of those larger and more complicated mercantile transactions incident upon the development of the modern industrial world, that doubts as to the moral aspect of these contracts could arise. Political science proves, and the law has followed the conclusion, that these time contracts now form a necessary part and perform a conservative function in the economy of a fully developed commercial life. They are an as yet undeveloped form of insurance of values to a purchaser, for which the purchaser pays a fair equivalent, and in process of time such insurances must perform a larger and more important function in the purchase of commodities or of representatives of value which have a tendency to fluctuate largely in price. For a time it was supposed that the ordinary policy of fire insurance partook of the nature of a bet, and there was doubt as to whether the Courts would enforce contracts of insurance, because it looked as though the insurer was saying to a man who wanted to have his house insured against fire, “I will bet you the value of you house that it does not burn down.” But we have long since departed from this infantile mode of looking at the situation and have learned to regard insurance as one of the conservative elements of modern civilized life, by which heavy losses are evenly distributed instead of coming with crushing effect upon the persons suffering the misfortune.