The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce | Page 9

dignity. It was erected by public
subscription to the memory of a man whose only distinction consisted
in a single term of service as a juror in a famous murder trial, the
details of which have not come down to us. This occupied the court and
held public attention for many weeks, being bitterly contested by both
prosecution and defense. When at last it was given to the jury by the
judge in the most celebrated charge that had ever been delivered from
the bench, a ballot was taken at once. The jury stood eleven for
acquittal to one for conviction. And so it stood at every ballot of the
more than fifty that were taken during the fortnight that the jury was
locked up for deliberation. Moreover, the dissenting juror would not
argue the matter; he would listen with patient attention while his eleven
indignant opponents thundered their opinions into his ears, even when
they supported them with threats of personal violence; but not a word
would he say. At last a disagreement was formally entered, the jury
discharged and the obstinate juror chased from the city by the
maddened populace. Despairing of success in another trial and
privately admitting his belief in the prisoner's innocence, the public
prosecutor moved for his release, which the judge ordered with remarks
plainly implying his own belief that the wrong man had been tried.
Years afterward the accused person died confessing his guilt, and a
little later one of the jurors who had been sworn to try the case admitted
that he had attended the trial on the first day only, having been
personated during the rest of the proceedings by a twin brother, the
obstinate member, who was a deaf-mute.

The monument to this eminent public servant was overthrown and
destroyed by an earthquake in the year 2342.
One of the causes of that popular discontent which brought about the
stupendous events resulting in the disruption of the great republic,
historians and archæologists are agreed in reckoning "insurance." Of
the exact nature of that factor in the problem of the national life of that
distant day we are imperfectly informed; many of its details have
perished from the record, yet its outlines loom large through the mist of
ages and can be traced with greater precision than is possible in many
more important matters.
In the monumental work of Professor Golunk-Dorsto ("Some Account
of the Insurance Delusion in Ancient America") we have its most
considerable modern exposition; and Gakler's well-known volume,
"The Follies of Antiquity," contains much interesting matter relating to
it. From these and other sources the student of human unreason can
reconstruct that astounding fallacy of insurance as, from three joints of
its tail, the great naturalist Bogramus restored the ancient elephant,
from hoof to horn.
The game of insurance, as practiced by the ancient Americans (and, as
Gakler conjectures, by some of the tribesmen of Europe), was gambling,
pure and simple, despite the sentimental character that its proponents
sought to impress upon some forms of it for the greater prosperity of
their dealings with its dupes. Essentially, it was a bet between the
insurer and the insured. 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. The
persons whom the capper represented--they called themselves an
"insurance company"--stood ready to accept the