The $3,700,000 surplus exacted the first year, under the new rates, is not to be used for paid-up or extended insurance or cash-surrender values, but is simply to be kept on hand as a reserve. The reserve, which has heretofore been carried in the pockets of the members, is now to be transferred to the pockets of the Supreme Council. Why are the members of the order, who have carried their insurance at great sacrifices, to have an additional burden placed on them? Why must this great reserve be created unless for the same reasons it was created in the three great companies in New York City? What is the object of creating a reserve when there is no paid-up or extended insurance and no cash-surrender to be made, and when assessments are required to be called for as needed to pay death losses? Why should any assessment company have a reserve beyond a few assessments ahead? What kind of actuaries did the Supreme Council have to make tables to produce such results? What fit guardians of 250,000 people are the one hundred and fifteen members of the Supreme Council who would adopt a table of rates producing such results? The control of the funds must have driven these one hundred and fifteen people mad to have produced tables which will so work. Would it not have been better to have called extra assessments from time to time under the authority of the laws of the order and of the State of Massachusetts, until the order was compelled to fail, than to have adopted the new rates, which are more expensive than old-line insurance and which if approved in the legal contest now pending will insure the failure of the order at once? The only true assessment insurance is to pay the death losses as they occur, by assessments, and which must include a fund for management and control. When the assessments become too great the company dissolves and that is the end of it. All those who have not died during its existence, or who have lapsed in the same time, have lost their bets, and those who have died have won. I am not able to give the number who have been members of the order since its origin. It could not have been more than 400,000. Of this number 35,000, or one-twelfth, have died. Over 33 per cent., or 133,333, have lapsed, and if the institution fails, as it certainly will, 367,000 have lost every dollar they have put in, in order that 35,000, or one in twelve, might draw prizes. Such institutions are contrary to public policy and should be suppressed. Each state insurance department should require such statistics as will show all the facts any one might wish to know. If I had the exact statistics, I am satisfied the proportion of those who pay in and lose would be much higher than I gave it.