I replied that a life-insurance company, especially great institutions with hundreds of thousands of policy-holders, must be as far above suspicion as Cæsar's wife; that the security of the immense funds in their possession must be as unassailable as the United States Constitution; but that immunity from criticism could be secured only by honesty of purpose, honesty of method, and honesty of results; and that I would follow "frenzied finance" wherever it might lead, even if the exposure brought every life-insurance concern in the country down to the ring-bolt of making public confession of complicity. But with all my knowledge of the "System's" weakness, I never dreamed of the condition of fatuity into which the past few years of unbridled "frenzied finance" have plunged its votaries. If the correspondence that follows here correctly represents the purposes and the methods of great American life-insurance companies, I ask my readers what quick, sharp, effective means should be taken to call a halt and rescue the billions of the people's savings before it is too late. And I ask all policy-holders in the great insurance companies to weigh carefully what follows, that from it they may decide the question.
As soon as it became fixed in the minds of the different interested parties who had communicated with me that my purpose was unalterable, queer things happened:
First, there appeared in the press of the country, under large, black headlines, the startling confession of the editor of a New York financial paper, who, conscience-stricken, admitted that he had been engaged in the systematic blackmail of insurance companies and officials and Wall Street institutions such as banks and trust companies. It was a curious document, and even the casual reader must have wondered at the mysterious lack of detail. The paper, I found