Corporation development has made savings and investments permanent as well as easy. Not many years ago it was a common saying that in America it was but "three generations from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves," meaning thereby that one generation saved, the next squandered, the next saved, and so on in an endless round. Whatever may have been the validity of this saying a half century ago, it certainly has not been true since corporations have come to occupy such a large place in American industrial life. Now a boy does not need to be able to succeed in business in order to keep his inheritance intact. He can invest it safely in bonds, or even in stocks, enjoying the income while he lives, passing the principal on to the next generation. Such an income is known as a funded income. The facility to invest huge sums of money with a reasonable degree of safety accounts in large measure for numerous other modern developments. Life insurance companies, for example, owe much of their growth and prosperity to the ease and slight expense with which they can invest their funds. Otherwise, their chief source of investment would be real estate mortgages, which, while safe, are expensive to handle. Many colleges and universities, too, owe their rapid development not more to the generosity of friends than to the opportunity they have to invest their endowments. Numerous other institutions, such as libraries, hospitals, learned societies, and settlement houses, have their endowments invested in the same way.