DELIVERED IN HARTFORD, AT A DINNER TO CORNELIUS WALFORD, OF LONDON
Gentlemen: I am glad, indeed, to assist
in welcoming the distinguished guest of this occasion
to a city whose fame as an insurance center has extended
to all lands, and given us the name of being a quadruple
band of brothers working sweetly hand in hand—the
Colt’s Arms Company making the destruction of
our race easy and convenient, our life insurance citizens
paying for the victims when they pass away, Mr. Batterson
perpetuating their memory with his stately monuments,
and our fire-insurance comrades taking care of their
hereafter. I am glad to assist in welcoming our
guest first, because he is an Englishman, and I owe
a heavy debt of hospitality to certain of his fellow-countrymen;
and secondly, because he is in sympathy with insurance
and has been the means of making may other men cast
their sympathies in the same direction.
Certainly there is no nobler field for human effort
than the insurance line of business—especially
accident insurance. Ever since I have been a
director in an accident-insurance company I have felt
that I am a better man. Life has seemed more
precious. Accidents have assumed a kindlier
aspect. Distressing special providences have
lost half their horror. I look upon a cripple
now with affectionate interest—as an advertisement.
I do not seem to care for poetry any more. I
do not care for politics—even agriculture
does not excite me. But to me now there is a
charm about a railway collision that is unspeakable.
There is nothing more beneficent than accident insurance.
I have seen an entire family lifted out of poverty
and into affluence by the simple boon of a broken
leg. I have had people come to me on crutches,
with tears in their eyes, to bless this beneficent
institution. In all my experience of life, I
have seen nothing so seraphic as the look that comes
into a freshly mutilated man’s face when he
feels in his vest pocket with his remaining hand and
finds his accident ticket all right. And I have
seen nothing so sad as the look that came into another
splintered customer’s face when he found he
couldn’t collect on a wooden leg.
I will remark here, by way of advertisement, that
that noble charity which we have named the Hartford
accident insurance company—[The
speaker is a director of the company named.]—is
an institution which is peculiarly to be depended
upon. A man is bound to prosper who gives it
his custom.
No man can take out a policy in it and not get crippled
before the year is out. Now there was one indigent
man who had been disappointed so often with other
companies that he had grown disheartened, his appetite
left him, he ceased to smile—life was but
a weariness. Three weeks ago I got him to insure
with us, and now he is the brightest, happiest spirit
in this land has a good steady income and a stylish
suit of new bandages every day, and travels around
on a shutter.
