Japanese war, individual ownership of property was unrestricted; every
person was permitted to get as much as he was able, and to hold it as his
own without regard to his needs, or whether he made any good use of it or
not. By some plan of distribution not now understood even the habitable
surface of the earth, with the minerals beneath, was parceled out among
the favored few, and there was really no place except at sea where
children of the others could lawfully be born. Upon a part of the dry land
that he had been able to acquire, or had leased from another for the
purpose, a man would build a house worth, say, ten thousand _drusoes_.
(The ancient unit of value was the "dollar," but nothing is now known as
to its actual worth.) Long before the building was complete the owner was
beset by "touts" and "cappers" of the insurance game, who poured into his
ears the most ingenious expositions of the advantages of betting that it
would burn down--for with incredible fatuity the people of that time
continued, generation after generation, to build inflammable habitations.
The persons whom the capper represented--they called themselves an
"insurance company"--stood ready to accept the bet, a fact which seems to
have generated no suspicion in the mind of the house-owner. Theoretically,
of course, if the house did burn payment of the wager would partly or
wholly recoup the winner of the bet for the loss of his house, but in fact
the result of the transaction was commonly very different. For the
privilege of betting that his property would be destroyed by fire the
owner had to pay to the gentleman betting that it would not be, a certain
percentage of its value every year, called a "premium." The amount of this
was determined by the company, which employed statisticians and actuaries
to fix it at such a sum that, according to the law of probabilities, long
before the house was "due to burn," the company would have received more
than the value of it in premiums. In other words, the owner of the house
would himself supply the money to pay his bet, and a good deal more.