The National Quarterly Review (Volume 31-32) (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1875. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... for the baneful and destructive habit, might have secured for the author a place among the distinguished writers of the age. What he is, his own words best tell. Let him give his own advice, which, if the reader will take to heart, he has not written in vain: "When a man is once a confirmed opium-eater, all the pleasure he can derive from opium would not equal the enjoyment a well man receives from the animal spirits alone; and all the intellectual force obtainable from stimulation can never approach that which would have been hie own freely in a natural condition."--p. 79. APPENDIX--INSURANCE: GOOD, BAD, AND INDIFFERENT. LIFE AND FIRE INSURANCE. 1. Reports of Insurance Cases in the Courts, etc. 2. Various Documents which exhibit Contrasts fcticeen the Different Classes of Insurance Companies. It is but too well known that the year about to close has witnessed the depression of all kinds of business. All interests have suffered, and, what is worse, they continue to suffer; although it is the general opinion, among those who have devoted most attention to the subject, that a favorable reaction is not far distant. This, howeyer, is not the question we mean to discuss on the present occasion; the task we propose to ourselves is a much more simple and less ambitious one--namely, to take a glance at the good and evil done in the past, but especially in 1875, in the world of insurance. None will accuse us of any disposition to connive at the machinations of insurance companies; it would be generally admitted, on the contrary, that none have more persistently denounced such. At the same time, it is not because we have regarded insurance malefactors as worse than malefactors, in general, that we have taken so much pains in every number of this journal for fourteen year...