Fraternity-Testvériség, 1950 (28. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1950-10-01 / 10. szám
TESTVÉRISÉG 5 the very worst enemies of all liberty? We Americans declare that we hold sacred the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We have said that man is to be as free as possible, while also being responsible. The nation’s founding fathers clearly insisted that government must be set up to serve man, and not man to serve the government. A New Serdfdom But here and now we have the sorry mess of the liberals today wanting to change all this. They propose to improve this arrangement by “planning” us into either a socialist or a communist or a fascist society in which all sign of human freedoms must certainly vanish. These planners and ploters would have the society (government or state) to be supreme in all things. Even God they would replace by the State. What need would we then have to guarantee personal rights and freedoms, if the state is to assume all the responsibility for everybody? No need, at all, if the State is supreme. These liberals, (I am now applying the label test to their works) care nothing for the Constitution. They are all totalitarians at heart. Their aim is political power to suppress the personal liberty that belongs to the individual. Here we have the strange spectacle of dangerous ’’liberals.” What else is the explanation, when those who love to call themselves liberals denounce as “reactionary” anybody who distrusts the police state and would halt the trend to totalitarianism? A “reactionary,” strictly speaking, is one who objects to progress and desires to turn back the clock. We must conclude then, that the real reactionaries of today are those liberals who would return us to the slavery of the State. They would make the coming century a new Dark Age. LIFE INSURANCE — A TEST OF MATURITY By Albert Edward Wiggam, D. Sc. There is a very special reason, not financial, why a young woman should ask her fiance whether he owns life insurance — because being insured indicates a good personality. Gordon Allport, Harvard University psychologist, says the first test of a mature, balanced individual is having a definite “life plan.” Such a person has learned enough of life to discover that he must plan to meet the future in the most intelligent way. Girls should ask frankly about their fiance’s savings and insurance. It’s not the amount, but the habit that counts. A LITTLE LIFE INSURANCE IN ACTIONS By Esther Mae Rancier, a high school student in Tampa. This essay won the second annual contest sponsored by the Tampa Association of Life Underwriters. From very close personal observation I have seen life insurance brighten a recent widow’s world when all was dark. This was the experience of my own mother. Before my mother’s marriage, she had a small insurance policy on herself. My father took it over after their marriage, but mother could not persuade him to insure himself. When I was born five years later, a 20-year endowment policy was taken out for me. It is small but it is something I am looking forward to soon. In the years that followed, father took out more insurance on mother, who was always ill, and kept mine up faithfully, but no amount of persuasion would induce him to insure himself since he never had been to a doctor in his life. In 1946, mother did the impossible! She, with the help of our insurance agent, finally persuaded father to take out a small policy on his life instead of more on her. In April, 1948, father returned home from our winter visit South ahead of mother and me. Three weeks later he was dead. We were still 1,500 miles from him. When he left us, he took the insurance books and money to pay the premiums with him. They were a little overdue, and mother was worried. When we received news of father’s death, we didn’t know whether he had paid the premiums or not. We didn’t even have the fare home — to say nothing of burial money. But father had remembered to pay his insurance. He hadn’t let his family down. Today mother works hard, but not half as hard as she might have to work if she had to pay off a large debt incurred by funeral expenses. The insurance money, small as it was, covered everything. Mother and I both look forward with confidence to a future made secure by life insurance. —Gulf Stream. AND HE WAS AN INSURANCE MAN Always a first question following the passing of a man with family or other responsibilities is, “I wonder how much insurance he had.” Even the ne’er-do-well who leaves enough insurance to pay his own debts and to be put away decently is respected by his neighbors who remain. Not so with the man who could have, but didn’t provide reasonably for those whom he had taught to depend on him. His stock reaches a new low and he leaves his friends sickeningly disappointed and with a feeling that he has
