The wonderful proposal of the Albert liquidators to the policy-
/holders, to continue the business and make a present of a fifth of the profits to the shareholders who had ruined them, has now been knocked on the head for good. The liquidators, it appears, were authorized by the Vice-Chancellor to spend £10,000 in holding meetings to ventilate their scheme,—£10,000 added to the losses, —but it found favour nowhere, and the coup de grace was given to it on Thursday at a meeting of the London policy-holders, who would hardly even listen to Mr. Price. Instead, they resolved, very sensibly, on the appointment of a Committee to watch over their interests, and secure for liquidator a nominee of their own ; and more than that, they gave the Committee power to test the liability of the shareholders in the amalgamated companies. If there is to be reconstruction at all, it will be for themselves alone, and there will be no friendly liquidator to overlook the negotiations and commissions by which all the companies have been plundered. Failing in their first plan, the liquidators take up the notion of a union with some more powerful company, which for a small commission would receive the premiums and pay the policies, and collecting the assets of the insolvent concern, divide the proceeds rateably among the share- holders ; but the victims cannot be too cautious both of this and -other plans which are thick as blackberries, the actuaries having it all their own way in the newspapers. Without understanding -actuarial science, they may know that what is lost is lost, and any .elaborate scheme has a chance of being made a swindle.
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