When our mutual life companies began their business in 1843, they had no
American table of mortality to guide them in determining the premiums of
insurance that ought to be charged at the different periods of life. There
were no American statistics public or private, good, bad, or indifferent, to
which they could refer, except the mortuary reports of cities, and these
were so imperfect and unreliable as to be utterly useless, except to
encourage the opinion that the chances of long life were about the same here
as in the countries from which our people had emigrated. It was known that
the numbers of the dying, as reported by our city registers, were below the
real deaths; that the ages were full of errors; that the boundaries of the
mortuary limits were constantly changing; that residents of the city were
often buried in the country, and sometimes country people were interred in
town; that the population was fluctuating; that the immigration from the
rural districts and from foreign countries was large and irregular; that the
census of the population, whether taken by the United States, or by the
states, or by the cities themselves, was full of errors; that the ages of
the living, both among males and females, were wrongly reported, sometimes
intentionally, but always carelessly and thoughtlessly; and that these
errors in the numbers and ages of the people and of the deaths were so
numerous that no confidence could be placed in the ratio of the living and
the dying at any particular age, while this ratio at all ages is an
indispensable element in determining the proper premiums to be charged in
any of the contracts made by our life companies.