to 1780 inclusive. Now, it was contended by many eminent statisticians that, however accurately these Tables had been prepared, yet, founded as they were on data so purely local, and referring as they did to so remote a period, they had necessarily ceased to be trustworthy. From a comparison of them with one or two other sets of Tables that had been prepared subse quently from other data, as well as from certain theoretical considerations that seemed to indicate that the value of life had increased in this country since the latter half of the last century, it was shrewdly suspected by the statisticians in question that the Northampton Tables represented the probabilities of life, particularly in the middle and higher classes, and in those classes particularly at the earlier and middle periods of life, at too low a figure; and consequently that the public at large were paying too dear for their insurances, and the Insurance Companies reaping very exorbitant profits. Thus, according to the Northampton Tables, the probable duration of a life already at twenty, was 33.43 years, that of a life at thirty was 28.27 years, and that of a life at forty was 23.08 years; whereas, according to calculations founded on the experience of the very companies that were using these Tables, the probable durations of three such lives were 41.05 years, 33.97 years, and 27.39 years respectively. Nor were the Insurance Companies quite ignorant of this suspected conflict between their experience and their principles, for it was a notorious fact that companies that had grown rich by the use of the old tables in the operation of insuring lives, would not use these Tables in the converse operation of granting annuities. Thus, if the same man who, insuring his life at twenty, had to pay as if he had but 33.43 years to live, had wished to purchase a life-annuity, he would have found the probable duration of his life in the company's estimation suddenly extended, and the balance doubtless set down to the notion that all annuitants live long. And here the private companies were wiser than the Government. In the sale of Government annuities the Northampton Tables were acted on. Hence, were it true that these Tables were no longer accurate, there arose the startling inference, that in the sale of Government annuities there was a constant waste of public money. Mr. Finlaison, the actuary of the National Debt Office, had repeatedly urged this fact on the notice of the Government, and had even submitted a calculation by which it appeared that, in the month of April 1827, the loss to the Sinking Fund, arising from this very discrepancy between the presumed and the actual rate of mortality among Government annuitants, amounted to £8000 a-week. Authorities, however, were not wanting on the other side. Mr. W. Morgan, for example, actuary to the Equitable

Paper on "Life Insurance.”

43

Society, the wealthiest and most extensive institution of the kind in Europe, maintained, both through the press and in evidence before the Committee on Friendly Societies, that Dr. Price's Tables still held good, and that there was no reason for altering them. This opinion, which Mr. Morgan advanced on the strength of his experience in the Equitable, was backed by other practical men, particularly by Mr. W. Glenny, secretary to numerous Benefit Societies, and Mr. W. Frend, actuary to the Rock Life Insurance Company.

It was to the question thus stirred that Mr. Chadwick addressed himself in the paper in the Westminster. Adopting the affirmative view of the question, namely, that the Northampton Tables did represent the probabilities of life in this country at too low a figure, he supported this view by a mass of facts and reasonings such as had hardly been accumulated on the point before. The chief value of the article, however, consisted in the thorough and explicit assertion that it made of the abstract principle that lay at the bottom of the whole controversy-to wit, that the duration of life at any locality being determined by the surrounding circumstances, and civilisation having, on the whole, a tendency to diminish the activity of such circumstances as are noxious, human life must, on the whole, in any progressive community, exhibit a tendency to increase in value. This important proposition, which had become clear to Mr. Chadwick during his previous studies, and especially in the course of his conferences with his Aberdeenshire friend, the well-known Dr. James Mitchell, was verified in the paper by a variety of considerations all supporting its a priori likelihood. Casting a glance, for example, over the period that had elapsed since the preparation of the Northampton Tables, Mr. Chadwick enumerated various special causes that had begun to operate during that period; which causes must, according to all medical and popular experience, have contributed to lengthen life. Such causes were vaccination, the diminution of the ancestral vice of hard drinking, the institution of savings' banks, the increase of habits of cleanliness, the improvement of medical science, the better construction of streets and houses, &c. In corroboration of the same truth, Mr. Chadwick appealed to the experience of foreign countries; and especially to that of France, as follows::

"According to a document which the men of science in France treat as satisfactory evidence, it appears that the annual deaths in Paris during the Age of Chivalry,' (the fourteenth century,) was one in sixteen or seventeen. During the seventeenth century it was one in twenty-five or twenty-six; and in 1824, it was one in 32.62. When the other parts of France were added to the capital, the pro

portion of deaths appeared still farther to have decreased; and, throughout the whole of France, the deaths during 1781 were one in twenty-nine. During the five years preceding 1825, it was one in thirty-nine. We have not the whole materials before us to enable us to determine accurately; but the total results prove to the satisfaction of men of science on the other side of the Channel that the value of life has doubled in France since le bon vieux tems,' and gained nearly one-third since the Revolution."

It is not necessary to detail more minutely the contents of the paper on "Life Insurance," nor to trace the effects of the agitation with which it was connected, in reforming the practice both of the Insurance Companies and of the Government annuity office. Suffice it to say, that the main practical object of the paper, an object not yet fully accomplished, was to press upon Government the duty of attending, in so far as it legitimately could, to the elaboration of the whole question of insurance against disease and mortality-as, for example, first, by a vigilant scrutiny into the constitution and principles of existing Insurance Societies, more particularly of Benefit Societies for the working-classes, so as to prevent the ruin and desolation too frequently caused by the failure of such institutions; and, secondly, by the establishment of such a complete system of registration of births, deaths, and marriages, as might furnish data for more equitable and special tables of insurance than were yet obtainable. It is important, however, to remark, that the very principle of the extensibility of life by the alteration of its external conditions which Mr. Chadwick expounded thus early, bringing it to bear on the disposition of those vast masses of money that are governed by the insurance tables, he has carried forward with him during his whole subsequent career, giving it a breadth and development that he could hardly have anticipated himself, and applying it with wonderful effect to the elucidation of the most diverse social phenomena. Of this, more hereafter; meanwhile let us take leave of the paper by quoting from it one or two parenthetical sentences of a general nature, satirical of the boasted skill of the so-called "Practical Men," into which Mr. Chadwick was tempted by the gross ignorance displayed by some of the practical men whose opinions he encountered in the course of the Insurance controversy.

"Under the evil influence of the habit of parroting, which is acquired under a common education, almost every person is taught his avocation according to fixed rules, and is made to believe that the existing practice, whatever it be, is the best possible. Before he has time to form an opinion for himself, the associations and belief chosen for him by others become so strongly impressed on his mind by habit, as, in a great measure, to destroy his power of forming, or even of en

"Practical Men."

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tertaining any new combinations on the subject. Hence, perhaps, it is, that the most important improvements in the arts and sciences have been made not by regularly-educated practical men,' but by persons trained up to other pursuits. The greatest improvements in agriculture have been made by persons bred up in cities. The best laws are made by persons who are not practical lawyers. As an instance of the operation of the causes to which we have alluded, as incapacitating men of extensive practice, and even of something more than mere routine, from forming a conception of any change or improvement, we may mention the recent case of Sir James Scarlett. It may be recollected that, a short time ago, a complaint was made in Parliament that the fees extorted from prisoners at the Sessions were so considerable, that the Court and jury, from motives of compassion, conspired to convict a poor man, in order that he might be fined a shilling, and be discharged from further payments. Sir James Scarlett hereupon rose: he candidly admitted and lamented the existence of the evil, but declared (and we fully believe in the sincerity of the declaration) that he could not see how it could be remedied! Mr. Peel ventured to say, in reply to the greatest of practical lawyers, that he humbly conceived the evil might be remedied by abolishing the fees.' We have heard of another practical man of the same class, who, on hearing that in Holland no distinction was made between real and personal property, expressed his supreme surprise at such deplorable barbarism. Such a practical man is about as competent to judge of the work of codification, or the substitution of any well-systematized body of laws for the incongruous jumble in the administration of which he is practised, as a well-praetised hackney-coachman or chairman could, from his practice, be fitted to judge of a comprehensive plan of direct and convenient streets, devised by a Sir Christopher Wren for the rebuilding of an old, ill-built, confused city, or even part of a city, with the obscure terms of which, its barbarous names, and the slang and usage of the frequenters, the said practical man was familiar. Such men are use

6

ful and often meritorious in their proper places; which are neither in the Legislature, nor, we make bold to say, on the Bench. Such men may suggest the straitening of an awkward turn, the stopping up of a hole in which they are themselves jolted, or the removal of a wall against which they have run their own heads; but the formation of new, plain, and direct roads, and especially any great convenience, or magnificent simplicity of combinations, are as much beyond their comprehensions, as they are foreign to their habits. From such minds comprehensive legislation, or decisions upon enlarged principles, never did and never will proceed."

About the time of the appearance of the foregoing article in the Westminster, Mr. Chadwick made the acquaintance of Mr. John Stuart Mill, then a very young man, and a contributor to the same Review. Through Mr. Mill he became acquainted with Mr. Senior, since well known for his writings in Political

Economy, and who was at that time engaged, together with Dr. Whately, now Archbishop of Dublin, in bringing out the London Review, the nominal editor of which was Mr. Blanco White. To this periodical Mr. Chadwick in 1829 contributed two papers-the one on " Preventive Police," the other on "The Adininistration of Medical Charities in France." In the second paper, which was in effect a criticism of the French medical charities, certain general principles for the administration of such charities were set forth. The paper on "Preventive Police" was even more important.

At that time, the Old Police System, which was essentially an inheritance from Anglo-Saxon times, patched up and complicated by the shifts and contrivances of centuries, still prevailed over the country. Bursting the paltry meshes of such a system, crime had increased and was increasing at a fearful rate. And no wonder, when we consider what the system was. Originally it had been nearly perfect. An agricultural population thinly spread over the country; this population divided into small sections or neighbourhoods, each comprising a limited number of families, all known to each other; and the members of each such neighbourhood, all bound to each other and to the State to prevent crime within their bounds, to keep an eye upon the movements of suspicious-looking strangers, and to hunt down criminals, under pain of personal damages in case of neglect― such was the ancient police-system of the Anglo-Saxons, and in the Anglo-Saxon state of society it appears to have answered admirably. Retaining the spirit of this piece-meal system, so consonant with that sturdy liking for local as distinct from central administration which characterizes the Germanic nations, the later English had only yielded so far to the necessities of a growing community, as to relieve the individual inhabitants of parishes and districts from much of the burden of repressing and detecting crime, and to cast it on special officers appointed, one or more in each district, and called constables. A thin sprinkling of annually elected constables over the counties, and closer knots of more permanent functionaries under different names in the larger towns-such was the aspect of the English police system prior to 1829. Had there been any general method of control or supervision, by which, these functionaries remaining such as they were, a common intelligence and organization could have been kept up amongst them, many of the prevalent evils of the system could have been rectified; but, as it was, each parish managing its own police, a criminal even without quitting the town where he had committed the crime, could baffle detection by dodging the pursuit through a round of separate jurisdictions. Thus in London and the suburbs, where there were