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mium fixed and the amounts of insurance decreasing.

either of these found a ready demand, but it is not clear whether this is due to the plan itself or to the facts that a larger commission was paid for selling the other form, that the other form seemed also, in view of the dividends, to be even cheaper while the premiums were not really expected to increase, and that current cost protection, though on unscientific and uhimately unsafe plans, was furnished much cheaper by assessment societies and orders.

The practicability of the plan, then, was not put directly to the test; but for certain reasons, now to be considered, it is believed that the result of such a test, if attempted, is sure to be unfavorable. For, first, the participating plan actually employed by the Provident Savings becomes pure natural premium at about age 6o and upward, the dividends not availing to hold the rate level; second, the discontinuances of good lives were perhaps not greater before those ages under the plan actually used than they would have been under a pure natural premium plan ; and, third, statistics as to mortality at advanced ages on current cost plans, though unscientific and calling for much less than the true one-year term premiums at these ages, strongly confirms the experience of the Provident Savings that under this plan excessive mortality must be expected at higher ages. Fortunately that company did not have so large a proportion of such lives as to jeopardize its existence or even its success.

Consideration of the nature of the plan shows that adverse selection at advanced ages must be expected, because the continually increasing premiums more and