222 LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

able in some cases to postpone, though they were powerless to avert it in
the long run, while, in an age in which Western preventive medicine was
making sensational advances, will and intelligence were showing them-
selves able to mitigate, and even to avert, sickness on the grand scale,
without, of course, being able to prevent death through sickness from
supervening in the last resort. When it came to accepting risks of acci-
dents, the insurance business was venturing into a field on the borderline
between the domain of a physical and a subconscious psychic life, that
were both governed by ascertainably, and therefore predictably, working
'laws of Nature', and the domain of a personal intelligence and will that
were free to pursue their own purposes. The risk of accidents being
caused by personal carelessness and recklessness was manifestly far less
easy to calculate than the risk of automatic physical and subconscious
psychic responses proving inadequate to cope with an emergency occur-
ring too suddenly to give the party's will and intelligence the time to
come into action. Nevertheless, the insurance business had found it
profitable to cover risks not only of accidents but of burglaries, which
were conscious, deliberate, and often carefully planned personal acts.

The fact that commercial profits could be made out of insuring against
risks of burglaries demonstrated that individual acts of human will might
be subject to laws of Nature' that would be statistically ascertainable if
the instances could be mustered in sufficient numbers; and this com-
mercially successful establishment of a burglary branch of the insurance
business in the history of a Late Modern Western Society was also an
indication that the dominion of 'laws of Nature' over individual acts of
will might prove not to be confined to the ordinary affairs of private
people but to extend to those extraordinary public affairs which had been
the conventional theme of History in all societies in process of civilization1
until the nineteenth-century Western historians had expanded their hori-
zon to include the ordinary affairs of private people in their panorama.
The latter-day Western phenomenon of burglary insurance had this
historical significance in the field of public affairs because burglaries
were the counterparts in private life of acts of military aggression and
diplomatic chicanery in public life—as a captured Tyrrhenian pirate

(editum A.D. 1783) compiled from records of deaths, recording the ages at death, in a
parish comprising the greater part of the English city of Northampton in the years
A.D. 1735-80; and 'the Carlisle Table* (editumA.o. 1815) compiled from censuses taken
in A.JD, 1780 and 1787 and. from records of deaths in the years A.D. 1779-87 in two
parishes of the English city of Carlisle.

When once the life insurance companies had begun to transact the business which this

original fund of statistical information had enabled them to start, their own records began

to provide them with a great and ever growing volume of data to serve them for the

elaboration and refinement of their statistics with an eye to increasing their aggregate

profits by transacting business on ever narrower margins. The first table to be constructed

• entirely from life insurance records was 'Morgan's Equitable Table* (editum A.D. 1834),

, which was based on the experience of the Equitable Life Assurance Society.

Accounts of these primordial foundations on which the Modern Western life insurance
business's indispensable statistical apparatus was originally based "will be found in
Farren, E. J.; "The History of Assurance', in The Assurance Mfigassint> vol. i (London

1948, University Press, a vola.), vol. ii, pp, 158-60. The writer of this Study was directed
to these authorities by the kindness of Mr. Thomas Wallas, the General Manager of the
London and Lancashire Insurance Company, Ltd. * Sec pp. i8a~4, above,