Benjamnin F. Butler, Butler's Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin Butler

[959] amount of her money, the principal and interest, to spend during her life, she can live in great comfort. Further, the money that the government receives as deposit may be invested at the highest rate of interest in payment of the national debt, and as the annuitants die out the debt will be paid. Let that annuity be non-assignable and not attachable, and let the checks for it go only to the annuitant personally and quarterly, or if she becomes insane, to her legal guardian.

As it is now I know of no place where such an investment can be made with perfect safety and certainty without its being very costly, heavy charges being collected to pay the profits of some company.

Let me take another case of which, unfortunately, there are so many unhappy ones existing which cannot now be provided for. A man who has worked the earlier part of his life and accumulated a large property, wishes to retire from business, or he would be glad to put his business into the hands of his children to be carried on for their benefit if he could safely do so. Under the terminal annuity system let him take one hundred thousand dollars of his money, or any other sum, and put it into the hands of the government, and receive back from them such portion of it every three months during his lifetime as such a sum will afford. Then he is certain, whatever happens to his business or whatever happens to his children, that he will have a lifelong support of comfortable size, or even better than that during his old age. And when he dies so much of the national debt will have been paid, because that one hundred thousand dollars has already been invested in the payment of the national debt and will not have to be paid over again.

I have said that the system of terminal annuities is an excellent way to borrow money, and in England the government issues annuities when it must have money. But as a rule the English system is that a man shall accumulate all he can to go to his son or according as he may will it. The English plan tends to keep accumulating property in the family, and is opposed to a man's spending all he has upon himself during his lifetime, and thus distributing his estate.

I laid this before two secretaries of the treasury, and the only objection ever made to it was that the government could not do any financial business. With such men as we have often had for