Excepted 
perils, i.e, 
perils ex- 
cluded 
from the 
scope of 
ordinary 
Fire Insur- 
ance Poli- 
nieq 
58 FIRE INSURANCE DURING THE WAR 
of a fire are by no means fixed ; experience has shown over and 
over again that the most careful estimates may be upset by the 
intervention of some such special factor as a high wind. Still, 
even in the most adverse circumstances there is a limit to the 
area of devastation caused by a fire originating from natural 
and fortuitous causes. 
There are, moreover, circumstances in which a fire may 
pass all the bounds upon which underwriting calculations are 
based ; for instance, two buildings or groups of buildings may 
be separated one from the other by a wide space which no 
single fire would ordinarily cross, but if the elemental forces 
are assisted by human malice the sanest calculations are apt 
to be upset. Thus, once rioters or rebels set a series of fires 
it is impossible to say where the destruction will be checked or 
to what area it will be confined, and the possibilities arising 
out of warlike operations are even more disturbing. 
In these circumstances the form of Fire policy in general 
ase at the outbreak of war contained a condition which had the 
effect of excluding from the scope of the insurance loss arising 
from riot, civil commotion, military or usurped power or 
foreign enemy. It was generally assumed that the term 
‘Military or Usurped Power’ included such events as war, 
civil war, rebellion and insurrection but nevertheless these 
were sometimes specifically mentioned—presumably with the 
idea of leaving no loophole for claims in respect of such happen- 
ings. This condition had, with slight variations, been in use 
for many years, and the insured public generally acquiesced 
in the restriction either because they did not know that it was 
in their policies or because they thought the contingencies so 
remote that exclusion of liability for loss thereby was not a 
great matter. If there had been a widespread demand for 
insurance protection against fire arising from these causes it 
is probable that insurers would have been willing to provide 
it either in the form of separate contracts or by an extension 
of the scope of existing policies, and a few insurers had in fact 
tried the experiment of granting policies from which these 
exceptions were absent. but it is significant that after the out-