INSURABLE INTEREST   251

On the next day the agent, by direction of the Company, offered to pay back the premium to Rombach and demanded the return of the policy for cancellation. Rombach refused to receive the money, and denied the Company's right to cancel the policy, whereupon the Company cancelled it, and notified both Rombach and Mrs. Geisler thereof.

Thereafter, Rombach on each quarter-day tendered the premium then payable on this policy to the Company, until Mrs. Geisler's death in December, 1877, and the Company refused to receive it.

The defendant pleads in answer that the policy is void because obtained through false and fraudulent representations of Rombach, viz., that the applied personally to the Company for the policy, re-questing its issuance, and represented that his mother-in-law de-sired the policy to be taken by him. We do not believe that. Rombach's plain, unvarnished statement is given already, and it is so perfectly in accord with the habit of insurance agents that it carries home conviction of its accuracy.

The additional defense is that the policy is "void for want of interest and consideration—that there was no love and affection between the assured and the beneficiary," and that he had not "such interest as the law requires to maintain such a policy."

The phraseology of this first quotation from the answer, as well as the interrogatories to all the witnesses, implies that the personal relations of the parties—their affection or hatred—is conceived to be the test of insurable interest. They do not affect it at all. Much time was wasted on both sides in exhibiting Mrs. Geisler's antipathy to her son-in-law at one time, and her reconciliation to him at an-other.

The insurable interest in the life of another is a pecuniary inter-est. A policy of insurance, procured by one for his own benefit upon the life of another, the beneficiary being without interest in the continuance of the life insured, is against public policy and therefore void. It is thoroughly settled, because universally held, that a wife has an insurable interest in the life of her husband, and although in that case especially it might be assumed that love and affection furnished a sufficient basis for it, the decisions do not place it on that ground, but rather on the support she is entitled to from him. The Books formulate the general principle somewhat in this way: when the insurable interest arises, or is implied from relationship, it will be deemed to exist when the relationship is such that the insurer has a legal claim upon the insured for services or support. Even though such legal claim does not exist, yet where from the personal relations of the two, and the kindness and good feeling displayed by the insured to the insuree, the latter has a reasonable right to expect some pecuniary advantage from the continuance of the life of the former or to fear loss from his death, an insurable interest will be held to exist. * * *