The Montgomery advertiser., 1905-12-19
FREEBOOTERS
 OF FINANCE Fearful EXcOriatiOn by Fred LandiS. THE INSURANCE CHAPTERS All Should Be Wearing
 Stripes, H. Says. The Most stupendous Trickery of Our Times, He Declares, is the In-
 vcstment Feature of Life
 Insurance.

Washington. Dec 1S.--with a pro. gram of speech-making until Thurs. day. many members of the House lief, for their homes Saturday and the at- tendance today on converting was small.
 The canal emergency appfopriation bbill was received from the Senate and read. Mir Hepburn explained that al the request of Mir. Williams, the bond ing provision in the bill was omitted ] and that other amendments were mi nor. He moved to send the bill to con | ference.
 | Mir. Williams pointed out that the bill still contained the provision to re- imburse the treasury the amount from tho sales of the bonds. If that should be omitted he should have moved to concur in the Senate amendments. MT. Bartlett of Georgia said the testimony before the Senate Committee had de- veloped that MT. Bishop was employed as a press agent at $10,000 q year. He an amendment cutting down this sal- ary.
 i The reply was that the bill contained Inc such amendment. An attempt to make the Senate Committee hearing a part of the record was blocked and the bill was sent to conference with Mfr. Hepburn of Iowa. Payne of New York
 
 ferees
 I The insurance debate was then be- gun. Frederick Landis of Indiana be- ing the first speaker.
 | Forty Million Interested. MT. Landis said there were in this country 1o:ooo,tvv policy-hoiders %, 000,000 policies and at least 100000 people interested in insurance. The amount of insurance now in force, he said. was s12,o0.00o,0o
 The suggestion, he said, that Q law should be passed declaring insurance interstate commerce confronted the ob- jection of the constitutionality and 1t would take longei to amend the consti- tution than to build battleship. He reviewed the time consuming process of getting judicial action on such law and said: '@rime has fine contempt for everything except D crisis and In her potter,s field rest the forms of many more imposing than this There would be opposition to Fed eraI control fin more than one-fourth Of the States. The benefits of Federal control, Mir. Landis believed. would be accomplished by the bill he has intro- duced. It subjects to Federal control all insurance companies doing business in the District of Columbia, the terri tories and insular possessions.
 Subject these corporations to na- tional supervision" he said, land the eagle will keep the vultures from pIucking the bodies of the dead"
 Would Disclose Scandals.
 Mir. Landis's bill creates q division of insurance in the Department of Com merce and Labor. and provides for Superintendent of Insurance. It re" ouires annual reports from all insur- ance companies doing business in the territory described. This would he said, disclose any scandalous perver- sion of funds.
 This would prevent. for instance. any life insurance corporation from holding $90,000, ,0o0 worth of securities marketed by J. P. Morgan & Co.
 This would supplant speculation with investments. This would disclose how far these companies had departed from the original purpose of insurance and wandered off into maze of more than 200 forms of policies. puzzling the mind and absolutely defrauding the people.
 '"This will direct attention to an amazing field of fraud. It will tell the story of conditions that Is represented, of stlpulations not understood, of obli- gations too heavy to be borne of dis honest estimates of earnings. as 1t would warn the people against the most stupendous trickery of our time, namely, the investment features of life
 
 insurance.
 Tn one of these great life insurance companies last year. only 5000 polt- cies came to a natural end, 1000 poli- cies were surrendered and 33,000 poli- cies lapsed.
 This will disclose where the cold blooded robbery of the past is being repeated. Let us hope that 1t will ex- plain to the inquiring policyholder why his dividend fell from $149 in 1876 to S7 In 1904, and why the dividends of his friend sank from $55 in 1876 to 8 in 1904. Let us also hope that such q system would make 1t impossible for q great corporation whose profits in 1904 were a million dollars greater than in 1905, to pay $200,000 less in dividends than in 1903.'
 One Big Christmas Tree.
 MT Landis described the salaries of life insurance officers as the touch of kin which makes the whole country a Christmas tree.
 These salaries. he said. were in the main dishonest. Touching on some of the reported transactions of insurance companies. he said his bill would pre- vent "a future Perkins as a vice presi dent of an insurance corporation from buying bad stock from Perkins as the trusted agent of J. P. Morgan and Com panY, and later transferring Ss00.000 worth of 1t to Morgan and Company December 31, 1903, and buying 1t back on the first of January, 1904. in order to make a false report to the supcrin- tendent of insurance.
 Tt would prevent the transfer of q million and q half dollars of indus trial stocks to q $500 a year employe in order to deceive the German empire. which forbids the holding of industrial securities. This will take them out of the saloon business, the hotel buciness, the banking business, the trust busi- ness. It will restrict them to the in surance business. This would dissolve the standing pair, which Mir. Perkins has had with himself for so many years.
 Tt will also prevent MT Cromwell, l the treasurer of one of these corpora tions, from continuing to be a mem l Der of sixteen different syndicates, all | of which do business with the Insu- ! rance corporations with which he is | Identified. This will prevent Mr. Harri- | man from borrowing $27.000,000 to cast | into @ struggle for the control of the | Northern Pacific Railroad.
 This is pluuder, Mir. Chairman. pure l and simple. One thing exceeds the per f tidy of these offenders and this Is their