are in the public square where all men, women, and children, cats, dogs, and asses may see and hear as they gouge, bite, and accuse each other of the vilest crimes.
These are the men in whose custody even now are the accumulations on which you, Mr. Policy-holder, are depending to take care of your wife and little ones, should you die. On the honor and responsibility of men who in the past five years have "saved" out of salaries of $20,000 to $100,000, private fortunes of millions, you must absolutely rely for the safety of the billions of dollars of your savings. The future of the helpless beings whom your hard daily labors provide with a livelihood is in the hands of men who admit having expended $100,000 of your money to provide a lordly and regal entertainment for a set of extravagantly paid agents and solicitors who, spurred on by prodigal inducements, have piled up huge amounts of new business on the company's books. I have explained to you before what such business is worth, that the agent gets so large a commission that he is practically in a position to accept risks at far below their cost to the company, and that such business as this is seldom renewed. The same men have been paying personal secretaries, gardeners, and flunkies out of your earnings; they have been feasting and traveling in private cars with large parties of the New York flubstocracy at your expense; every possible extravagance they have been guilty of by means of the revenues some of you have worked fourteen to eighteen hours a day to gather in. Shame, I say, on such contemptible thievery.
I cannot resist the temptation to pull back the slide from one episode of the past.