IF a young man can afford only one investment, and especially if others are dependent upon his earnings, life-insurance is always the best. It comes first; it is most elementary, fundamental and essential. Death is the one sure thing. To the majority of families, the death of a breadwinner means privation, trouble and bitterness. In nearly all such instances, life-insurance will provide against the loss of earnings.

It is a strange thing that people will insure against loss by fire, which rarely happens, but fail to provide against the loss that comes from death, although this always happens. And it is not true that life-insurance benefits one's family only. It has very great and direct benefits to the person who becomes insured. There is no greater fallacy than the remark so often heard about life-insurance: "I must die to win."

Life-insurance is an absolute answer to those who say they can not save. If a man can not save enough to buy a small insurance policy there is only one place left for him, the county poor house. A few cents a week will do it.

The great point about life-insurance is that as soon as the first year's premium has been paid, the entire amount of the insurance is payable upon death. That is, by paying down a few hundred dollars, a man may provide his family with as much money as would have taken him twenty or thirty years to save. Of course, the man does not want to die, and his family does not want him to die, but the chance is always there, and if he does die all his good intentions about saving are worthless. Without life-insurance, every word that has been written in this book up to this point should be considered fit only for the waste-basket.

Suppose you die in the first year of saving. The savings-bank will return your deposit plus some interest; the insurance company will pay the full face of the policy. From the bank your family can get only what you actually saved - from the insurance company they will get what you intended to save. And how many people make savings-bank deposits regularly every year? How many people leave them in the bank after they have started them? How numberless are the pretexts under which they are withdrawn and spent, or loaned and lost?

Suppose a young man twenty-five years old, married a year and expecting an addition to his family, saves three hundred dollars a year. Of that sum he puts one hundred dollars in the bank and two hundred dollars in life-insurance. If he dies a year later, his widow will receive one hundred and four dollars from the bank and ten thousand from the insurance company. Suppose he had put the entire three hundred dollars in the bank. What would become of his widow and unborn child with total resources of only three hundred and twelve dollars?

A firm in New York City, Moffat & Atwood, prepared a table which was published in the American Magazine. It shows how a family lives on a salary of six thousand five hundred, and also how they must live when the father dies leaving an estate of thirty thousand dollars, safely invested to produce fifteen hundred dollars a year income. The figures would be even more startling if a smaller salary had been used.

The above table demonstrates the tremendous shrinkage in income that occurs when the active earning capacity of the husband and father ceases. It immediately occurs to one that in order to have provided for the betterment of conditions under which his wife and children had to live after his death the man should have carried more insurance.

It is not necessary in this book to go into the theory or principles of life-insurance, but I want to say a word to the young man who does not understand how it is possible for an insurance company to make such big payments as those I have mentioned. The company knows from mortality statistics the exact average duration of life. Each person who is insured is a "risk." He may die to-morrow and then the company must lose heavily. But when you average hundreds of thousands and millions of lives, the risk is reduced to a certainty, and it is possible to determine the exact average cost of protecting all these people. Each person is charged enough so that his "premium," which is the amount he pays in, added to all the other premiums and invested, with allowance made for overhead expenses, equals the losses to be made good as the years go by.

I assume that only a safe and reliable company is selected from which to buy insurance. There are hundreds of such companies in the United States. It is entirely possible for the average man, exercising ordinary judgment and common sense, to determine for himself the soundness of the concern in which he insures. Any state insurance department, which can be addressed at your state capital, will tell you whether any concern doing business in that state is reputable and dependable.

I shall have occasion to refer only to "old line" companies, eliminating fraternal and assessment insurance, because the latter are not on the whole on such a scientific basis. Among the reliable "old line" companies are those doing a so-called "industrial" business, which means the writing of small policies where premiums are collected weekly; stock companies; mutual companies; non-participating companies, in which no so-called "dividends" are ever paid to policy-holders; and participating companies, which do pay such dividends. Among all these there is little chance of making any disastrous mistake. Insurance among all the various kinds of companies tends to become more uniform and standardized.