The number of ways in which the wager was
made--all devised by the insurer--was almost infinite, but in none of them
was there a departure from the intrinsic nature of the transaction as seen
in its simplest, frankest form, which we shall here expound.
To those unlearned in the economical institutions of antiquity it is
necessary to explain that in ancient America, long prior to the disastrous
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.
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