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Finlaison on all difficult and complicated inquiries arising from day to day. During the twelve years while he held this post he was also engaged in many other confidential duties. He was desired by Lord Mulgrave to prepare the materials for a defence of the naval administration before parliament in 1810, and with three months' labour collected a mass of information which enabled Mulgrave to make a successful defence. In 1811 Finlaison compiled an exact account of all the enemy's naval forces. Such information had never before been obtained with even tolerable accuracy. Experience proved it to be correct, and it was quoted in parliament as an authority. In the same year he was employed to investigate the abuses of the sixpenny revenue at Greenwich Hospital, a fund for the support of the out-pensioners, and in his report showed that by other arrangements, as well as by the reform of abuses and the abolition of sinecure places, the pensions might be much increased. The subject of the increase of the salaries of the government clerks having twice been forced on the notice of parliament, John Wilson Croker in 1813 directed Finlaison to fully inquire into the case of the admiralty department, when, after six months of close attention, he completed a report, upon which was founded a new system of salaries in the admiralty. In 1814 he compiled the first official ‘Navy List,’ a work of great labour, accuracy, and usefulness. It was issued monthly, and he continued the duty of correcting and editing it until the end of 1821. From 1817 to 1818 he was occupied in framing a biographical register of every commissioned officer in the navy, in number about six thousand, describing their services, merits, and demerits; this work he engrafted on to his system of the digest and index, where it formed a valuable work of reference for the use of the lords of the admiralty. He introduced into the naval record office a hitherto unknown degree of civility towards the public and of readiness to impart information. Having as librarian found many valuable state papers relating to the American war, he was in 1813 induced to attempt the completion of Redhead Yorke's ‘Naval History,’ which was intended to form a part of Campbell's ‘Lives of the Admirals.’ He carried out his design in part by continuing the history down to 1780. This portion of the work was printed for private circulation, but its further progress was abandoned. In 1815 Dr. Barry O'Meara, physician to Napoleon at St. Helena, commenced a correspondence with Finlaison, his private friend, on the subject of the emperor's daily life. In 1824, by the desire of the writer, the letters were burnt. Some copies of them, however, had fallen into other hands and were published in 1853 in a book entitled ‘Napoleon at St. Helena and Sir Hudson Lowe.’ Finlaison now completed a work on which he had been employed since 1812, the fund for the maintenance of the widows and orphans of all who were employed in the civil departments of the royal navy. Through Lord Melville's intervention his efforts terminated successfully in the establishment of the fund by order in council 17 Sept. 1819. The naval medical supplemental fund for the widows of medical officers also owed to him its existence and subsequent prosperity. Until 1829 he remained the secretary, when the directors treated him so ungenerously that he resigned, and by mismanagement this fund was ruined in 1860. The success of these charities, together with his subsequent investigation into the condition of friendly societies, upon which he was employed by a select committee of the House of Commons in 1824, introduced him to a private practice among benefit societies; he constructed tables for many of these, furnished the scheme of some, and entirely constituted others. Among other societies with which he became connected were: the London Life, the Amicable Society, the Royal Naval and Military Life Assurance Company, and the New York Life Assurance and Trust Company. The government in 1808 instituted a new system of finance based upon the granting of life annuities, the tables used being the Northampton tables of mortality. On 1 Sept. 1819 Finlaison made a first report to Nicholas Vansittart [q. v.], in which he demonstrated the great loss that was sustained by the government in granting life annuities at prices much below their value, the loss in eleven years having been two millions sterling (, Insurance Cyclopædia, v. 496–514). His report was not printed till 1824, when he was directed to make further investigations into the true laws of mortality prevailing in England. The result of his studies was the discovery that the average duration of human life had increased during the century. His tables were also the first which showed the difference between male and female lives (‘Life Annuities. Report of J. Finlaison, Actuary of the National Debt, on the Evidence and Elementary Facts on which the Tables of Life Annuities are founded,’ 1829).

Before the close of 1819 he furnished the chancellor of the exchequer with a statement of the age of each individual in the receipt of naval half-pay or pensions, fourteen thousand persons, thence deducing the decrement of