Family and personal uses of life insurance

The primary purpose of life insurance is the protection of
the family. Every family is dependent for subsistence upon
an income which necessarily varies in amount with the par-
ticular circumstances surrounding its case. In some in-
stances this income is obtained from the return on invested
funds which have been accumulated or inherited, but in the
overwhelming majority of cases the subsistence of the family
depends upon the current earnings of the husband. He is the
breadwinner who has definitely assumed responsibility for the
support of those dependent upon him, and his wife and chil-
dren have a right to look to him for adequate maintenance.
His life has a value (and the same is also often true of the
mother or son) to the dependent members of the family, and
it is this value of one life in its relation to another that justi-
fies the existence of life insurance. If a man owns a house
or other destructible property he usually allows little time to
pass before insuring it in some fire-insurance company. Yet
why consider the value of property as more important than the
value of the life of the owner, when in the great majority of
instances the value of the latter to the family exceeds that of
the former? Moreover, the property may never burn or be
otherwise destroyed, since it appears that only about one fire
occurs to every one hundred and seventy-five fire policies,
while death is certain to happen. As Benjamin Franklin
aptly stated: "A policy of life insurance is the oldest and
safest mode of making certain provision for one's family. It
is a strange anomaly that men should be careful to insure
their houses, their ships, their merchandise, and yet neglect
to insure their lives, surely the most important of all to their
families, and more subject to loss."

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