Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/358

344. Several times, when he had done so, he had taken heavy amounts of life-insurance, so that in case of the failure of his undertakings, and his own death before he could regain his financial feet, his family would not suffer. On previous occasions he had dropped the greater part of his insurance as soon as his business ventures had terminated successfully. This is not an uncommon thing for rich or speculative men to do.

In 1878 Colonel Dwight died, with an insurance on his life of about $265,000, some of which he had carried for years; but a large part of it had been recently taken for the reasons above stated, and as he had done before under similar circumstances. Fifty thousand of this sum was in old and new policies against one company.

This company paid at once, thus giving the widow means to fight for her claims against the other companies. In a short time one of the other companies, against which she had a small claim of $5,000, also paid. The other nineteen companies contested. The widow employed Senator Conkling, and the fight has been the hardest, the bitterest, and the most ghoulish insurance contest ever had in this country; and finally the companies have won in the Court of Appeals on a purely technical point, after having dug Colonel Dwight's body up several times, in the effort to prove that he was poisoned, that he hung himself, and that he was not dead at all! They failed utterly to prove any material cause of contest; but they finally won on the ground that, in answering a question in the application for insurance, Colonel Dwight did not state that he had ever engaged in the liquor business, whereas it had been known that he had owned a hotel where liquor was sold.

Now, when it is remembered that at one time these companies tried to prove that Colonel Dwight had committed suicide, but that they never had any grounds upon which to claim that he had died of intemperance, the purely technical grounds for the decision of the Court of Appeals is apparent. Ninety-nine policies out of a hundred could be contested on such ground as that; and so long as insurance contracts retain these unreasonable and oppressive features, no man can be sure that he is not leaving a lawsuit and bitter sorrow to his family, and worst of all a blasted reputation for himself, when he applies for insurance under such a form.

An officer of one of the companies was heard to boast of the fact, but a few days ago, that his company had spent nearly ten times the amount of the claim against it in this Dwight contest! This is economy indeed! Whose money was thus spent? The policy-holders'. For what? To defeat one of the policy-holders in a contest for a claim no doubt as honest as any one of the others will present in his turn.

But suppose that this was not an honest claim; suppose that Colonel Dwight was not a "good risk," is it not a rather suggestive