"The same trouble, or very nearly the same, exists for your soldier of fortune. To be sure, he faces facts--there can be no doubt about that--but they are facts he deliberately seeks, and not the actual obstacles that the world rolls up before him. He gets color and excitement all right, but the quality of the self-constructed excitement isn't quite so fine; in fact, after a while it begins to pall on one. Then, too, a man wearies of doing things that serve no useful end and that get nowhere; he begins to feel awkward and superfluous in the whole scheme of things. And these soldiers of fortune don't really _do_ anything, they merely put on the canvas a few bold strokes that attract ephemeral attention but which their successors promptly paint out, and they leave the world precisely where it was before they entered it or carried on their living." "But isn't that much the same with you, too? Fire insurance doesn't _get_ anywhere, does it? Of course it's more useful to provide people with fire insurance than with South American revolutions, but after all it isn't indispensable. The world could move, couldn't it," she said diffidently, "without fire insurance? At least it did so for a good many centuries." "The modern world couldn't," Smith said promptly. "Insurance is one of the things that the world, having had, could not do without. You do not perhaps realize the trend of the world to-day. It is no longer military; it is along commercial lines. Napoleon and Wellington to-day would be capitalists, either bankers or merchants or manufacturers, and their battles would be fought with money, not men. The world is ruled by commerce and trade--and where would trade be without fire insurance? Nowhere. The foundation of modern trade is credit. Without credit, no trade--or either petty trade limited to cash transactions or trade carried on by great millionaires or trusts who are above the fear of fire--although it is doubtful if there are any such. But for ordinary people, take credit away and trade is at an end." "How is that? I don't understand," the girl said. "Business to-day is transacted mainly on borrowed money. Jones, who keeps a corner grocery store, hasn't enough money to buy groceries because his customers don't pay him until the end of the month. So he goes to White and Company, who are wholesale grocers, and buys his stock on credit. But do you suppose White and Company would let him have those groceries if it were not for insurance? Certainly not; that's their only protection. If Jones's store burned with that stock before it was sold, and there was no insurance, who would lose? Not Jones--White and Company could force him into bankruptcy, but that wouldn't collect their bill. As I said, trade would be impossible, except cash trade and that in the grip of interests so vast that the ordinary run of fire losses wouldn't count." "I never thought of that before," the girl remarked.