Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/677

Rh increased by two years, and that of female life by no less than 3·4 years as compared with the English life-table." And he showed further that "among males seventy per cent and among females sixtyfive per cent of this increased life would be lived between the ages of twenty and sixty years, or during the most useful period."

I should like to be able to tell the value in working-power of such an addition to our lives. It is equal to an addition of more than four per cent to the annual value of all the industry, mental and material, of the country.

But some will say—admitting that it is desirable, seeing how keen the struggle for maintenance already is. Can more than this be done? and the answer may be and must be. Much more. In this, as in every case of the kind, every fruit of knowledge brings us within reach of something better. While men are exercising the knowledge they possess, they may be always gaining more. This Exhibition has scores of things which are better helps to national health than those of the same kind which we had twenty years ago, and with which the gains already made were won. If I were not in near official relation with the jurors, I would name some of them: there are truly splendid works among them.

But do not let me seem to disparage the past in praising the present. It is difficult to speak with gratitude enough of what has been done, even though we may see, now, ways to the yet better.

Any one, who has studied the sources of disease during the last thirty years, can tell how and where it has diminished. There is less from intemperance, less from immorality; we have better, cheaper, and more various food; far more and cheaper clothing; far more and healthier recreations. We have, on the whole, better houses, and better drains; better water and air; and better ways of using them. The care and skill with which the sick are treated in hospitals, infirmaries, and even private houses, are far greater than they were; the improvement and extension of nursing are more than can be described; the care which the rich bestow on the poor, whom they visit in their own homes, is every day saving health and life; and, even more effectual than any of these, is the work done by the medical officers of health, and all the sanitary authorities now active and influential in every part of the kingdom.

Good as all this work has been, we may be sure it may become better. The forces which have impelled it may still be relied on. We need not fear that charity will become cool, or philanthropy inactive, or that the hatred of evil will become indifference. Science will not cease to search for knowledge, or to make it useful when she can; we shall not see less than we do now, and here, of the good results of enterprise and rivalry, and of the sense of duty and the sorrow of shame that there should be evil in the land.

What more, then, it may be asked, is wanted? I answer, that