Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/452

448 The courts have arbitrarily placed the value of one productive male at $5,000. This is estimated on the basis that the interest on $5,000 at six per cent, is $300, the amount of wages which a man would earn at $1 a day for three hundred working days. If then, the husband of a family is killed by the railroad, and his wife secures a judgment of $5,000, it is believed that she has obtained in this sum the equivalent of his services to her and her children. This is not true. That life was worth more than $5,000 to the family and to the nation. Few common laborers in this country to-day earn less than $1.50 per day; for three hundred working days this would be $450, which is 6 per cent, of $7,500. But the wife in these days could not obtain 6 per cent, interest on this sum in any safe investment. We will not here speak of the progressive increase in the cost of living compatible with the maintenance of self respect, a very important consideration. If she could safely secure, in the Eastern States, at least, 4 per cent, she could consider herself fortunate, and if the judgment instead of $5,000 should be $10,000, this at 4 per cent, would not amount to her husband's annual wage.

In the case of the death of a mechanic earning $2.50 per day, the loss to the family and the state, computed on the 4-per-cent. basis, would be represented in round numbers by the sum of $19,000. As we advance in the social scale we find that intelligence begets increased productivity, and increased productivity in the individual represents to the state and to the family, the social unit, greater monetary value as an asset.

Some lives are of much greater value to society than are represented merely by their physical and mental creative powers. How are we to estimate the value of such lives as Lord Lister, Lady Henry Somerset, Lincoln, Clara Barton, Edward Everett Hale, Charles W. Eliot, Andrew Carnegie, Bishop Brooks, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Tolstoi? Not in the value of their actual physical and mental productivity during life can the estimate readily be made. Not even in the value of the force of their example alone, but in the great impetus which such personalities give to the realization of high ideals, the purification of social and political life, and in the betterment and advancement of the race are we to look for a just estimate of their worth. A worth which it is impossible to calculate on a commercial basis. Yet these units are subjected to practically the same chances of infection from contagious diseases, and countless other dangers, as the average citizen. It is not the duty of the state to provide special means for the protection and preservation of such lives, but to institute such general measures as will reduce to the minimum such agencies as menace all human life, thus saving to the service of the state lives of all classes of society, the annual ruthless waste of which now amounts to hundreds