[20] It is difficult to avoid blaming the offices. These large and
varied insurances were, probably, known to every company in existence.
The reasons assigned should have been tested, and very little trouble
would have shut the door of every office in London on Wainwright and
his companions. For so much money to be risked on the life of a girl
of twenty-one, described as “remarkably healthy, whose life was one
of a thousand,” and that too for only two years, merely because a
nominal plea of insurable interest was given, was neglectful and almost
culpable; although there is some extenuation in the fact that this lady
assisted to deceive by uttering, or at least coinciding in a false
statement to Mr. Ingall, at the Imperial, is certain. The slightest
inquiry would have discovered that Wainwright was a beggar, that this
young lady had no direct or indirect interest in any property whatever,
and that the premiums must have been paid with some sinister purpose by
a man steeped in difficulties and overwhelmed with debt, on the life of
a healthy but most unhappy girl, entirely under his control.
[21] “Lucretia.”--By Sir E. B. Lytton.
[22] This man appears to have been an innocent tool in the hands of his
acute brother-in-law.
[23] This was first pointed out by the Quarterly Review.
[24] The following form extracts from the above articles of Mr.
Mackenzie:--“Some time ago there was sent to this office a series
of advertisements in favour of the Independent and West Middlesex
Insurance Company, which were entered and paid for in the regular
course of business. We are cautious about quack medical advertisements,
none of them that we are aware has ever been admitted into our columns;
but it never entered into our heads for one moment, that an insurance
company professing to be incorporated by special acts of parliament,
was in truth a quack company, got up for the premeditated purpose
of imposing on the public in matters of fire and life. Hence the
advertisements of this company glided through our columns from time
to time to time.... But we were astonished lately to learn that this
was a spurious insurance company hatched in London two years ago.”
“Under these circumstances, our duty, we humbly conceive, is at once
plain and decisive, and therefore we proceed to discharge it for the
sake of the public, whose faithful and unflinching servants we at all
times profess to be. In a word, we raise our voice and warn the public
against this Independent West Middlesex Insurance Company. It is a
false and fictitious company.” “In their polices of insurance they take
care to provide that ‘the capital stock and funds of the said company
shall alone be answerable to the demands thereupon under this policy.’
Why, what is the value of their capital stock and funds, if as we say
the parties themselves forming the said company are utterly worthless,
being in fact no better than a parcel of tricksters in London,
disowned, or repudiated, or condemned by every respectable person to
whom reference is made? There can scarcely, we think, be anything so
base or so nefarious as taking premiums from unsuspecting people, and
making them believe they are secured against the contingencies of life,
or the risk of fire, and yet mocking them in their calamities when the
bubble bursts.”
[25] The cholera first visited England about the beginning of August
1348. From the seaport towns on the coasts of Dorsetshire, Devonshire,
and Somersetshire, it ran to Bristol, and the men of Gloucester
established a quarantine between the two places. But this “familiar
fury” mocked then as now at the quarantine, and walking in darkness
appeared in Gloucestershire to the horror of its inhabitants. From
thence it passed by way of Oxford to London, finally spreading all over
England, “scattering everywhere such ruin and desolation that of all
sorts hardly the tenth person was left alive.”
In the church and churchyard of Yarmouth, 7052 were buried in one year.
Within six months, in the city of Norwich more than 57,000 died. In
London, death was so outrageously cruel that every day saw twenty,
sometimes forty, and sometimes sixty or more dead bodies flung into
one pit. The churchyards became crowded. Fields and additional places
of burial were set apart, and these soon failed to suffice; the number
of the dead increasing so rapidly that “they were fain to make deep
ditches and pits very broad, wherein they laid a range of carcasses and
a range of earth upon them, and then another range of dead bodies,” and
in this manner the people, except those of the better sort, were placed
in their long home. The cattle died in hedges and ditches by thousands
for want of men to attend them. All suits and pleadings in the King’s
Bench and other places ceased. The sessions of parliament were stopped.
England and France forgot for a time that they were “natural enemies.”
County, city, and town witnessed solemn prayers and public processions
for days together, and God was implored in highway and in byway to
“sheath his angry sword and preserve the residue from the devouring
pestilence.” When this pestilence which yet yearly threatens our coast
had passed away, it was found that its prey had been chiefly old men,
women, and children of the “common sort of people,” and that but few
of the nobility of the land had been seized by it. Property was for
a long period depreciated: that which was previously sold for forty
shillings, only fetched a mark; and the Scots in scorn invented a new
oath, swearing in contempt “by the foul deaths of the English.”