zeal—made jot tremendous progress. You had a great many plus factors to talk about   first y ear cash values, an unexcelled dividend record, the principle of retroaction, and other things—all of which made the net results favorable to the Mutual Benefit policyholder. The years following the Armstrong investigation were great years. The Mutual Benefit was supreme: you recognized no competitors.

But things began to happen—a lot of things that need not be named or described. Companies, generally, made a great splurge on disability; the Mutual Benefit refused to go along. For a long time you had no

disability contract to sell. Then, when the Company introduced its special disability contract, it gave you no financial inducement to sell it—since you had said you weren't concerned about commissions. One after one, other companies introduced a

family income contract. As the depression came on and deepened, a variety of special or trick policies appeared. The Mutual Benefit re-fused to be stampeded, and its only move to meet changed conditions was the introduction, in 1933, of the Ordinary Life Increasing Premium plan.

Following the collapse of security markets, and particularly after the bank holiday, the relative financial

security of life insurance companies led to tremendous interest in annuities and single premium life insurance. Most companies offered at-tractive rates. The Mutual Benefit insisted upon keeping its rate so high as to he practically non-competitive —until recently.

As a result of these things, and perhaps other factors, the task of the Mutual Benefit agent was made comparatively difficult. In the minds of many of you, it seemed that the Com

pany was sleeping, lagging behind the procession. You howled about it. You thought the Company was becoming hopelessly reactionary and old-fogey in its ideas. Many men, some of them good salesmen, left the ranks and joined other companies, led away by the belief that it was easier to sell for the company that had disability, family income, favorable annuity contracts, and so forth.

Fortunately, the great majority of the Company's agents stuck to the job   not always because they loved
the Mutual Benefit so much, but be-cause they hated other companies more. You saw the Company make some changes to meet the change in conditions after a thorough study of the problem had been made and the Officers could be reasonably sure of their ground.

By 1932 the Company's new business had fallen rather low as it had in other companies, and it was losing ground in business in force, but that situation was not due entirely to the stand which the Company had taken in relation to the selling of special contracts, annuities, and single premium insurance. The sales force, itself, must take a considerable portion of the blame. For years. you had taken advantage of the liberal features of the Mutual Benefit con-tracts to do some unwise things. You had made too much of the first year cash values, and through the mini-mum deposit plan you sold many policyholders ideas they would have been better off without. You emphasized, in your selling, the superiority of our cash and loan values. You made the agents of other companies conscious of this superiority. As a result, when the time of stress came, our contracts were the first ones used for loans or surrendered for cash.

You emphasized dollar values in our contracts instead of the purposes which the contracts would fulfill. A common sales practice. You had special inducement due to superior contracts. Oftentimes you failed to tie the policy contract definitely to some important personal ob-

Continued on page 12

Ft. G. KENAGY

The new superintendent announced new sales tools

FOIL JI'NE, 1936   9