The monument to this eminent public servant was overthrown and destroyed by an earthquake in the year 2342.

One of the causes of that popular discontent which brought about the stupendous events resulting in the disruption of the great republic, historians and archaeologists are agreed in reckoning “insurance.”  Of the exact nature of that factor in the problem of the national life of that distant day we are imperfectly informed; many of its details have perished from the record, yet its outlines loom large through the mist of ages and can be traced with greater precision than is possible in many more important matters.

In the monumental work of Professor Golunk-Dorsto ("Some Account of the Insurance Delusion in Ancient America”) we have its most considerable modern exposition; and Gakler’s well-known volume, “The Follies of Antiquity,” contains much interesting matter relating to it.  From these and other sources the student of human unreason can reconstruct that astounding fallacy of insurance as, from three joints of its tail, the great naturalist Bogramus restored the ancient elephant, from hoof to horn.

The game of insurance, as practiced by the ancient Americans (and, as Gakler conjectures, by some of the tribesmen of Europe), was gambling, pure and simple, despite the sentimental character that its proponents sought to impress upon some forms of it for the greater prosperity of their dealings with its dupes.  Essentially, it was a bet between the insurer and the insured.  The number of ways in which the wager was made—­all devised by the insurer—­was almost infinite, but in none of them was there a departure from the intrinsic nature of the transaction as seen in its simplest, frankest form, which we shall here expound.

To those unlearned in the economical institutions of antiquity it is necessary to explain that in ancient America, long prior to the disastrous Japanese war, individual ownership of property was unrestricted; every person was permitted to get as much as he was able, and to hold it as his own without regard to his needs, or whether he made any good use of it or not.  By some plan of distribution not now understood even the habitable surface of the earth, with the minerals beneath, was parceled out among the favored few, and there was really no place except at sea where children of the others could lawfully be born.  Upon a part of the dry land that he had been able to acquire, or had leased from another for the purpose, a man would build a house worth, say, ten thousand drusoes.  (The ancient unit of value was the “dollar,” but nothing is now known as to its actual worth.) Long before the building was complete the owner was beset by “touts” and “cappers” of the insurance game, who poured into his ears the most ingenious expositions of the advantages of betting that it would burn down—­for with incredible fatuity the people of that time continued, generation after generation, to build inflammable habitations.