Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/180

168 had been sold in the last century. These annuities may be briefly described as the paying of a certain annual sum for a number of years calculated on the probable number of years the annuitant may live, in return for a "lump sum" given by him to the Government. Several such series of annuities had been issued by the Government when in dire distress for funds, and found highly profitable; but now it became apparent that the Government was losing money, and a searching incpiiry by authorized experts, plainly showed that the men who were receiving the annuities were living too long—a state of things that demanded reform; and, as wholesale murder could not be indulged in, the problem was attacked from the other side, and by a more extended and careful set of investigations an equitable basis for the issuance of future annuities was found. At this time it was clearly shown that the duration of life in 1725 compared to that in 1825 was as three in the former to four in the later time.

We, who are born into this age of tabulated statistics, can form but a feeble notion of the slender grounds on which those misleading annuities were founded. True, more than five hundred years the Romans had begun a register of citizens, including sex and the dates of birth and death, which was continued for a thousand years; and, from a study of it, the average period of human life was computed at thirty years. There are no life-tables at all reliable now that are over fifty years old. The first English census worthy of the name was taken in 1851; but it is a curious and valuable circumstance that while Geneva in Switzerland was undergoing the inevitable ferment caused by the presence of such an agitator as John Calvin, she did, in 1551—just three centuries ahead of England—set up such a recording and tabulation of her citizens as makes the records invaluable as a means of comparison, and shows that, from a death-rate of forty in the thousand previous to 1600, it had fallen before 1800 to twenty-nine in the thousand, and there has been a steady decrease since; so that the average of human life in that city was computed fifty years ago at more than forty-five years—a gain of one half over the Roman average.

France also set herself at the problem of life-values. Baron Delessert—the founder of the Philanthropic Society of Paris—found that the annual death-rate in that city during the age of chivalry—the fourteenth century—was one in sixteen; during the seventeenth, one in twenty-six; and in 1824, one in thirty-two. Taking all of France together, the deaths during 1781 were one in twenty-nine; but in the five years preceding 1829 they were one in thirty-nine. Thus the value of life in France had nearly doubled since "the good old times."

It was next found that, in the prisons of England, which were