Regular readers will recognise in this article a continuation of the series previously entitled "Healthy Brains." The author of "The Children All Day Long" is an intimate disciple of one of the greatest living psychologists, and she has a message of the first importance to all who realise that true health depends as much on poise of mind as on physical fitness.

It is an unpleasant subject, but have you ever faced the fact that your widow might be left in poverty?

We all know the phrases that come so glibly from the lips of the insurance agent. Perhaps the very fact that it pays companies to spend thousands a year on the salaries of agents, and other thousands on broadcast eye-catching advertisements, shows that there are many things which our imagination only accepts "against the grain." Fire, storm, loss by theft or burglary, sickness, disablement and death we do not, by choice, dwell on these things in thought.

Now some people are inclined to pet this impulse of turning away. "Do not think dark thoughts," they tell us, "the best insurance is unconsciousness, insouciance, denial. Misfortune will pass you by if you do not look for it."

Perhaps there is something to be said for this method when it comes with absolute spontaneity from the innermost nature. But if for the radiant apprehension of beauty and health we substitute an effort to cling to the picture of good when our very bodies and nerves are warning us with suggestions of evil, we run grave risks. By adopting someone else's sense of freedom from danger and repressing our own conviction that for us a certain danger, more or less remote, exists, we are putting great pressure upon ourselves. At times of ill-health or accidental worry, a sleepless night may bring us an agonising succession of imaginative pictures, those very pictures which we have attempted to banish from our daily life. If we have still greater power of repression these grim images, forbidden throughout every moment of waking life, may reappear in dreams.

(Of the still more serious dangers of repression and of its relation to various forms of insanity, this is hardly the place to speak.[11] It ought not to be necessary to appeal to alarming instances in order to make us attend to a suggested warning.)

[11] See Bernard Hart's illuminating treatment of the whole subject in The Psychology of Insanity, Cambridge Manuals of Science.

Now if we decide to regard all fear as a suggestion of precaution, the emotional part of it to be laid aside as soon as it has fulfilled its function of arousing interest and directing action, it is easy to see the psychological justification for insurance.

Of course pecuniary insurance is but one instance of such sequences of action, though it happens to be a rather obvious one. In a different field, most of us know the delightful feeling of relief experienced after consulting a doctor about some symptom that has perhaps been troubling us for a long time. "May I safely do this? Ought I to refrain from that?" and such perpetually recurring irritations to the attention are replaced by the knowledge that it is now the doctor's business to decide whether this or that is "serious," and that as long as we carry out his orders we may lay aside all worry about the matter.

So in the case of fire insurance, what we are really buying with our annual premium is freedom from haunting questions as to the loss that would ensue if our house or shop or office were burnt down or damaged. Whenever the thought comes, it may, as far as the money loss is concerned, be dismissed.

We see then that instead of keeping the suggestion of such misfortunes before us, as some people might allege, the act of insurance substitutes for vague and recurrent fears a formal and periodical recognition of possibilities, a recognition, too, that contains within itself a precaution against some of the results of the misfortune should it ever occur. What we buy, at the cost of a fixed number of pounds or shillings of money and a few minutes of time once a year, is the right to put the dangers out of our consciousness altogether and yet leave no residuum of repressed fear to split up our personality or give us indigestion.

If we choose, for some reason or other, to let our imagination dwell on the objective side of the possibility we have insured against, we shall find a pleasure in thinking of what can be done by many people working together. If we need help to meet some misfortune, it is ours as a right, not doled out to us through others' pity. And every year that we have made no claim we have the delight of knowing that we are helping those who need.

The art of working together is yet in its infancy. But if even the present standard of method devised for money insurance were to be adopted in the deeper matters which we so often allow to trouble us, what an advance in mental development we should have made and what new possibilities of safe action would be opened up!

E.M. Cobham.

Every Youth Should Learn To Do Something Finely And Thoroughly With His Hands

Ruskin.