Omaha daily bee., 1909-01-22
To the Policy Holders.

The work of your Company during 1908 and its condition
at the close of that year deserve more than ordinary consldera-
ton and study. Your interest in the brief tabular exhibits
attached is two-fold. You have the responsibility and the anx-
iety of policy-holders; you have also a wider interest. Com
merce is more than business; it is the great civihzer. Life IN
surance is more than mutual protection; 1t Is a great social
force. Let us. for a moment, consider that aspect of these
figures.
If a considerable portion of the wealth created yearly by
society could be gathered on a pro rata basis, invested so as
to earn a reasonable rate of interest, and then under an exact
and scientific program be turned into cash instantly at any
point and applied to the relief of human distress, a long step
would be taken toward the social betterment of men. There
would be neither charity nor confiscation in such a plan. 1t
would not eliminate ambition or initiative; but it would greatly
reduce poverty, ignorance and their familiar fruits.
But society is not organized in that way. In the struggle
for existence the weak are brutally driven to the wall. Prop
erty itself is not always money, and money saved is frequently
worth less than its full value, because it is not well placed or is
not quickly available.
There is. nevertheless. a large section of society more
wisely organized than society as a whole-a gid of men and
women whose weak ones are not trampled on, whose property
at the time Of greatest need is always available and is always
money. This is life insurance.
Life insurance is what society would be and it does what
society would do if society were organized as suggested above.
If society, instead of life insurance, accomplished these results,
we might begin to hope for a speedy realization of some of our
social ideals. But conditions and results achieved are no less
real and no less valuable socially, because they belong to what
we call business. Life insurance achieves such results daily,
with certainty, with justice and with large benefits to society.
AS a policy-holder in the New York Life Insurance Com
pany, you were a part of such a plan in 1908, and indirectly
you were busy producing just such results every month In that
WHAT YOU DID IN 1908.
Consider for a moment this Company-and by this Com
pany, l mean, primarily, its memberships it was at the
beginning of 1908, and consider what it has accomplished
within twelve months. One year ago the company consisted Of
people insured under about 100000 policies, citizens Of every
considerable country. They were under definite contracts with
each other which called for scientific cooperation and mutual
protection. They had paid such sums into a common fund that
all their matured obligations had then been met, and, ON Janu-
airy LIST, 1905, against an ultimate average obligation of about
$1,000 per policy, there was accumulated about 1926. The
membership was under definite contracts duly to provide the
difference between the sums accumulated and the sums ulti-
mately due.
What happened during 19Osi You directly reached and
relieved the beneficiaries under 5000 policies when their chief
resource had been taken away by death; your relief went into
the 46 states and 6 territories of the United States, and into Al
other countries. The total of this relief, as expressed in money,
was $22,131 ,29O.77. But that is only a part of the story. You
sent these families, not property, but money; you reached them
Immediately and just when need was greatest. In doing that
you really did more. You did what no other organized body
of men could do, except these similarly organized. You paid
to these beneficiaries a partial equivalent for the property
value of lives cut off prematurely.
Most insuring persons are young. They have strength Of
body, a reasonable mental equipment and an average training.
When they assume the obligations of home and children they,
in effect, make a contract with society, but the burden Of that
contract for a time is on society. They are themselves their
chief asset. But the bank will loan no money on that asset
when life is extinct, and very little when life is at its full. II
that asset fails, these men default to society, and society has
no remedy except the orphanage and the reformatory.
A large portion of the death claims of 1908 represented
the salvage of the one really valuable asset which these families
had-a resource which, by all the ordinary rules of business,
was totally lost. These payments prevented social defaults and
to that extent made the orphanage and reformatory unnec-
! essary.
1t is worth while for you, as policy-holders, TO know some
thing of the other things which you accomplished in the year
1905. You paid in all to your own membership, $40, 191, 258. 40.
This total includes death-claims, annuiies, dividends, matur-
ing endowments, maturing deferred dividend policies and sur
render value for contracts sold to the Company. You loaned
to your own membership, on the securities of their own poll
cles, S2S,OOO,OOO. For your own protection, you increased the
general funds of the Company book valuesl by about $42,-