It will be admitted, that the number of men who can lay by a sufficient store of capital for the benefit of their families, is, in these times of intense competition, comparatively small. Perhaps the claims of an increasing family absorb nearly all their gains, and they find that the sum which they can put away in the bank is so small, that it is not put away at all. They become reckless of ever attaining so apparently hopeless an object as that of an accumulation of savings, for the benefit of their families at death. Take the case of a married man with a family. He has begun business, and thinks that if his life were spared, he might in course of years be able to lay by sufficient savings to provide for his wife and family at his death. But life is most uncertain, and he knows that at any moment he may be taken away,--leaving those he holds most dear comparatively destitute. At thirty he determines to join a sound life office. He insures for five hundred pounds, payable to his survivors at his death, and pays from twelve to thirteen pounds yearly. From the moment on which he pays that amount, the five hundred pounds are secured for his family, although he died the very next day. Now, if he had deposited this twelve or thirteen pounds yearly in a bank, or employed it at interest, it would have taken about twenty years before his savings would have amounted to five hundred pounds. But by the simple and beautiful expedient of life assurance, these twenty-six years of the best part of his life are, on this account at least, secured against anxiety and care. The anticipation of future evil no longer robs him of present enjoyment. By means of his annual fixed payment--which decreases according to the profits of the society--he is secure of leaving a fixed sum at his death for the benefit of his family. In this way, life assurance may be regarded in the light of a contract, by which the inequalities of life are to a certain extent averaged and compensated, so that those who die soon--or rather their families--become sharers in the good fortune of those who live beyond the average term of life. And even should the assurer himself live beyond the period at which his savings would have accumulated to more than the sum insured, he will not be disposed to repine, if he takes into account his exemption from corroding solicitude during so many years of his life.