The inspector reported this conversation, and I sent a detective to investigate the case. He remained there, disguised of course, for two or three weeks, and then reported that large shipments of cheese to distant parts had taken place previously to the fire; but he could find nothing to criminate any individual, until accidentally he noticed what looked like a dog's muzzle lying in a corner of the stable. He picked it up, and untying a string that was wound around it, found it to be the leg of a new pair of pantaloons of fine quality. Watching his opportunity the same evening, while in conversation with the claimant, he produced the trowser-leg quietly, and enquired where the fellow-leg was? Taken by surprise, the young man slunk silently away. He had evidently cut off a leg of his own pants, and used it to muzzle his house-dog, to silence its barking while he set the factory afire. He left the country that night, and we heard no more of the claim.
A letter was received one day from a Roman Catholic priest, which informed me that a woman whose dying confession he had received, had acknowledged that several years before she had been accessary to a fraud upon our company of one hundred dollars. Her husband had insured a horse with us for that amount. The horse had been burnt in his stable. The claim was paid. Her confession was, that the horse had died a natural death, and that the stable was set on fire for the purpose of recovering the value of the horse. In this case, the woman's confession becoming known to her husband, he left the country for the United States. The woman recovered and followed him.
In the year 1875, the blow fell which destroyed the Beaver Insurance Company, and well nigh ruined every man concerned in it, from the president to the remotest agent. In April of that year, a bill was passed by the Dominion Legislature relative to mutual fire insurance companies. It so happened that the Premier of Canada was then the Hon. Alexander Mackenzie, for whose benefit, it was understood, the Hon. George Brown had got up a stock company styled the Isolated Risk Insurance Co., of which Mr. Mackenzie became president. There was a strong rivalry between the two companies, and possibly from this cause the legislation of the Dominion took a complexion hostile to mutual insurance. Be that as it may, a clause was introduced into the Act without attracting attention, which required the Beaver Company to deposit with the Government the sum of fifty-thousand dollars, being the same amount as had been customary with companies possessing a stock capital. For eighteen months this clause remained unobserved, when the Hon. J. Hillyard Cameron, being engaged as counsel in an insurance case, happened to light upon it, and mentioned it to me at the last meeting of the Board which he attended before his death, which took place two or three weeks afterwards. At the following Board meeting, I stated the facts as reported by him, and was instructed to take the opinion of Mr. Christopher Robinson, the eminent Queen's counsel, upon the case. I did so at once, and was advised by him to submit the question to Professor Cherriman, superintendent of insurance, by whom it was referred to the law officers of the Crown at Ottawa. Their decision was, that the Beaver Company had been required by the new Act to make a deposit of fifty thousand dollars before transacting any new business since April, 1876, and that nothing but an Act of Parliament could relieve the company and its agents from the penalties already incurred in ignorance of the statute.