Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/676

660 We may become the more sure of what may be done by looking at what has been done already. Let me show some of it; it will be a relief to see something of the brighter side of this picture.

In a remarkable paper lately read before the Statistical Society, Dr. Longstaff says, "One of the most striking facts of the day, from the statistician's point of view, is the remarkably low death-rate that has prevailed in this country during the last eight years." In these years the annual death-rate has been less than in the previous eight years in the proportion of two deaths to every 1,000 persons living. The average number of deaths has been 50,000 less in the last than in the previous eight years. Doubtless many things have contributed to this grand result, and it is not possible to say how much is due to each of them; but it would be unreasonable to doubt that the chief good influence has been in all the improved means for the care of health which recent years have produced. This is made nearly certain by the fact that the largest gains of life have been in the diminution of the deaths from fever, and of the deaths in children under fifteen years old; for these are the very classes on which good sanitary measures would have most influence.

The annual number of deaths from typhus, typhoid, and the unnamed fevers, has been about 11,000 less than it was about twenty years ago. The annual number of deaths of children under five years old has been about 22,000 less than it was; and that of children between five and fifteen has been upward of 8,000 less.

These are large results, and, though they tell only of deaths, yet they bear on the chief subject I have brought before you—the working power of the nation; for, however much we might assign to improved methods of medical treatment of fever, yet the diminished number of deaths means a very large diminution in the total number of cases. The deaths during the working years of life were 6,500 less; and, this being so, we may hold that, if the average mortality was, say, twenty-five per cent, the diminution in the total number of cases must have been at least 25,000; and if we may believe, as before, that each of these involved ten weeks of sickness, we have, in these fevers alone, a clear saving of 185,000 weeks' work in every year.

And so with the diminution of the mortality among children, there must have been a greater diminution in the number of costly and work-wasting illnesses, and a large saving of money that would otherwise have been sunk. And not only so: but many of the children saved in the last eight years will become bread-winners or care-keepers; and who can tell what some of them will become; or what the world would have lost if it had lost all of them?

Let me add only one more reckoning. In a paper last year, at the Statistical Society, Mr. Noel Humphreys showed that "if the English death-rate should continue at the low average of the five years 1876-'80, the mean duration of male life in this country would be