The first legal restraint, under British regu lation, was one designed to check a tendency to gamble on marine risks, resulting in the es tablishment of the principle of insurable inter est. Experience and study combined to fur nish a scientific foundation for insurance Bur in the 18th and 19th centuries in the matter premiums and areserves, and during the atter century the competition of numerous small companies tended to develop business and to find new fields for its application, so that to-day insurance enters every part of our commercial and social structure.
When the business of insurance was largely local, public opinion influenced its control, but with the later growth of companies extending their operations over wide areas, it became necessary to define closely by statute all the conditions in order to secure equitable treat ment to the insured and to conserve the funds necessary to meet future obligations. As the result of public control this far, there has emerged a decided tendency to uniform 'stand ards, methods and requirements that may in the end develop a uniform code of insurance in the United States, where now 52 diverse local codes have often hampered the transaction of interstate insurance by varied and conflict ing or duplicative requirements.
The present State laws covering the essen tials of insurance organization, methods of business and standards of solvency have, under the pressure of business demand, become so much the same that a development toward Federal control of interstate insurance would naturally follow an acceptance of such insur ance as an element or instrument of com merce. This is asserted by insurance leaders
to be in line of progress and would open the way for a Federal code that would serve as a model to all the States and Territories.
The entry into the United States of a large number of foreign companies, during recent years, will likewise tend to bring interstate in. surance under national control. At the present time nearly 100 such corporations are doing business in New York. Matters relating to American companies abroad and to national supervision found place in President Cleveland's second and third messages, and in President Roosevelt's fourth and fifth messages. Shortly after the declaration of war against Germany in 1917 the Federal government took charge of the business of all enemy corporations in the United States.
American laws recognize uniformly the practice of rigid separation of fire, or com bined fire and marine, from life, health and accident insurance, and both from the general casualty lines, and require separate organiza tions for their transaction, herein differing from practice in Europe, where several lines may be covered by one company, though usually with a separation of funds.