We in our generation have become so familiar with a universe so much larger than that known to the Ancients that we naturally wonder how the wise men of Greece and Rome and of Judea could have had or seem to have had so little curiosity about the earth upon which they lived and of which they were so ignorant.
Cicero found that age increased the pleasure of conversation. It is certainly true that in age we do find our tongues if we have any. They are unloosened, and when the young or middle-aged sit silent the octogenarian is a fountain of conversation. In age one set of pleasures is gone and another takes its place.
The old man reasons well, the judgment is clear, the mind active, the conscience alert, the interest in life unabated. It is the memory that plays the old man tricks.
Names and places with which one has been perfectly familiar all his life suddenly, for a few moments, mean nothing. It is as if the belt slipped and the wheel did not go around. Then the next moment away it goes again. Or shall we call it a kind of mental anesthetic or paralysis? Thus, the other day I was reading something about Georgetown, S. A. I repeated the name over to myself a few times. Have I not known such a place some time, in my life. Where is it? “Georgetown.” “Georgetown.” The name seems like a dream. Then I thought of Washington, the Capitol, and the city above it, but had to ask a friend if its name was Georgetown. Then suddenly as if some chemical had been rubbed on a bit of invisible writing, out it came! Of course it was Georgetown. How could I have been in doubt about it; I had lived in Washington for ten years.
CHAPTER IV
STATISTICS OF OLD AGE AND ITS CARE
I—Numbers of old people increasing in all known lands where data are available—Actuarial and other mortality tables—Expectation of life and death-rate at different ages—Longevity and fecundity—Death-rate in different occupations—Irving Fisher’s ideas on longevity—The population problem—Longevity in ancient Egypt and in the Middle Ages—Diversity of statistical methods and results.
II—Growing need of care for the indigent old—Causes of improvidence—Ignorance and misconception of what old age is and means—Why the old do not know themselves—Old age pensions in Germany, Austria, Great Britain and her colonies, France, Belgium, United States—Industrial pensions and insurance, beginning with railroads—Trades unions—Fraternal organizations—Retiring pensions in the army and navy—Local and national insurance—Teachers’ pensions—The Carnegie Foundation—Criticism of pension systems—Growing magnitude, urgency, and diversity of views and methods—The Life Extension Institute—“Borrowed Time” and “Sunset” clubs—Should the old organize?
Before discussing the nature and functions of old age, which chiefly concern us in this volume, we must in a brief, summary way answer two preliminary questions: (1) how many old people are there in the registration areas of the world to-day as compared to earlier times and to the total population; and (2) what is done for them publicly and privately. Each of these topics has a copious literature and experts of its own. On the first or statistical problem there is still great diversity of methods and results, which I simply present and make no attempt to harmonize, for this would be premature. As to the second point, of care, I have also attempted only a bird’s-eye view and avoided details.