Of the many forms of gambling known as insurance that called life insurance appears to have been the most vicious.  In essence it was the same as fire insurance, marine insurance, accident insurance and so forth, with an added offensiveness in that it was a betting on human lives—­commonly by the policy-holder on lives that should have been held most sacred and altogether immune from the taint of traffic.  In point of practical operation this ghastly business was characterized by a more fierce and flagrant dishonesty than any of its kindred pursuits.  To such lengths of robbery did the managers go that at last the patience of the public was exhausted and a comparatively trivial occurrence fired the combustible elements of popular indignation to a white heat in which the entire insurance business of the country was burned out of existence, together with all the gamblers who had invented and conducted it.  The president of one of the companies was walking one morning in a street of New York, when he had the bad luck to step on the tail of a dog and was bitten in retaliation.  Frenzied by the pain of the wound, he gave the creature a savage kick and it ran howling toward a group of idlers in front of a grocery store.  In ancient America the dog was a sacred animal, worshiped by all sorts and conditions of tribesmen.  The idlers at once raised a great cry, and setting upon the offender beat him so that he died.

Their act was infectious:  men, women and children trooped out of their dwellings by thousands to join them, brandishing whatever weapons they could snatch, and uttering wild cries of vengeance.  This formidable mob overpowered the police, and marching from one insurance office to another, successively demolished them all, slew such officers as they could lay hands on, and chased the fugitive survivors into the sea, “where,” says a quaint chronicle of the time, “they were eaten by their kindred, the sharks.”  This carnival of violence continued all the day, and at set of sun not one person connected with any form of insurance remained alive.

Ferocious and bloody as was the massacre, it was only the beginning.  As the news of it went blazing and coruscating along the wires by which intelligence was then conveyed across the country, city after city caught the contagion.  Everywhere, even in the small hamlets and the agricultural districts, the dupes rose against their dupers.  The smoldering resentment of years burst into flame, and within a week all that was left of insurance in America was the record of a monstrous and cruel delusion written in the blood of its promoters.