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Updated: June 23, 2025
"Writing up policies is one thing," this friend had assured him, emphatically; "collecting the premiums is another matter... If your fire-insurance premiums aren't paid up inside of two months, the policies are canceled. But they let the others drag on until the cows come home. There's nothing so intangible in this world as insurance. And people hate to pay for intangibilities."
His fears were confirmed. He had been brought before the executive committee on a charge of rebating preferred by Kendrick. The evidence was complete in at least three cases and they all involved Brauer's clients. In short, Kendrick had sworn affidavits from three people to the effect that a representative of Starratt & Co. had granted a discount on fire-insurance business.
He must not believe that the fire-insurance offices will raise their rates of premium on Charles River, because the new volume of poems is printing at Riverside or the University Press.
It was quite expensively fitted up; and the plate-glass front glittered with gold-and-black sign-lettering. The chairs and sofas were upholstered in black leather. On the walls hung several decorative advertisements of fire-insurance companies, and maps of the town, county, and state.
I think that what is called practical joking, which aims at deliberately producing such situations, is a wholly detestable thing. But it is one thing to sacrifice another person's comfort to one's laughter, and quite another to be amused at what a fire-insurance policy calls the act of God.
The people who had yielded up their consent so smilingly to Fred for personal accident policies, or automobile insurance, passed him furtively on the street or sent word out to him when he called at their offices that they were busy or broke or leaving town. He did not attempt to do much toward collecting the fire-insurance premiums.
'Slimed with hypocrisy? Yes, good friends, 'slimed with hypocrisy. Have you not known men and women, legions of them, who shouted their fire-proof Belief, Belief, Belief, their fire-insurance Belief that was to roof them from rain of fire and act as an umbrella against the results of their own misdeeds; who underscored their Bibles, and prayed long and loud, and proclaimed themselves right, when every day, every act of every day, every leastermost act of very hour, shouted blasphemous denial of what so ever is lovely and pure and unselfish and Christlike; whose influence damned and injured and blighted every life it touched?
As the telegraphic and telephonic wires are extended so as to traverse practically all the streets of every city, the fire-insurance companies will find it to their advantage to promote a simple plan, depending on the use of a combustible thread passing round little pulleys in the corners of all the rooms and finally out to the front, where an electrical "contact-maker" is fixed, so that on the thread being burnt and broken at any point in its circuit, an electric message will be at once sent along the nearest wire to the fire-brigade station and a bell set ringing both inside and outside the premises.
"I do not feel myself equal to playing the part of either Romulus or Remus in founding your new Rome," I wrote; "but I think as a writer of fire-insurance policies, and keeping the office work up, I may prove myself not entirely a deadhead. My wife asks how the breathing-spaces for the populace are coming on?" And the die was cast! We make our Landing.
The fire-insurance companies will very shortly awake to the fact that prompt telegraphic alarm in case of fire is worth far more than the majority of the prohibitions upon which they are accustomed to insist by way of rendering fires less likely. The main principles upon which the electric fire-alarm will be operated have already been worked out and partially adopted.
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