"Do poor people live longer than the affluent? There are so many more poor in the world than there are rich that we can be sure of finding more poor old people. Probably excessive wealth is a burden sure to exhaust its possessor in the care of it. Our millionaires, however, are men for the most part who began poor and were possessed of tenacious vitality, that is, with a grip on other things as strong as on the money bags. Professor Humphrey's 'Report on Age of Persons' gives us 824 persons, of both sexes, of whom about half were poor and the rest at least in good circumstances, 10 per cent only being possessed of wealth. The real truth seems to be that poverty, with an iron constitution and sound nerves, is most likely to produce an instance of extreme age; but the possession of the comforts and amenities of life produces by far the best average of ages. The average age of the middle classes has always surpassed that of others; but at present sanitation forces on the poor so many provisions against disease that they are saved from their former high death-rate, and brought quite near the privately better-bred and furnished class.
"There has certainly been long sustained, in proverbs and otherwise, a conviction that early rising and early retiring have much to do with prolonged vitality. Franklin insisted on it vigorously. Lord Mansfield, also, held it to be an important item in his sustained vigor to near ninety. I am inclined to believe that the estimate is not erroneous. We are far more the creatures of habit than we generally allow. At certain moments we become regularly hungry, regularly sleepy, and so with all other functions. It is wise beyond doubt to recognize this fact and never break our habits, that is, our useful habits. But beyond this, there are certain habits dependent on cosmical causes, such as movements of the sun. Our natural rest would seem to be properly conformed, in the main, to the appearance and disappearance of daylight.
"But after we have fairly and fully considered the subject, there remains the one fact that idleness will end life sooner than any other cause. The hour that any person retires from any and all occupation he is sure to drop into decadence. The mind is very sure to begin to lose its clearness when it is withdrawn from regular exercise. Both brain and muscular power lapse with lack of activity. The custom of working excessively till sixty-five or seventy, and then withdrawing from business, is wrong at both ends. We crowd life at the beginning, and let its functioning grow torpid at the close. Much is lost to age by our modern methods of locomotion. Great walkers are scarce; there is almost a total lack of horse-back exercise. Carriage-riding over smooth roads in no way compensates."
Perhaps there is nothing that prolongs life more than genial, hearty laughter. William Matthews says "that there is not a remote corner or little inlet of the minute blood-vessels of the human body that does not feel some wavelet from the great convulsion caused by hearty laughter shaking the central man. Not only does the blood move more quickly than it is wont, but its chemical or electric condition is distinctly modified, and it conveys a different impression to the organs of the body, as it visits them on that particular mystic journey when the man laughs, from what it does at other times. A genial, hearty laugh, therefore, prolongs life, by conveying a distinct and additional stimulus to the vital forces. Best of all, it has no remorse in it. It leaves no sting, except in the sides, and that goes off. Cicero thought so highly of it that he complained bitterly at one time that his fellow-citizens had all forgotten to laugh: Civem mehercule non puto esse qui his temporibus ridere possit. Titus, the Roman emperor, thought he had lost a day if he had passed it without laughing. What a world would this be without laughter! To what a dreary, dismal complexion should we all come at last, were all fun and cachination expurged from our solemn and scientific planet! Care would soon overwhelm us; the heart would corrode; the river of life would be like the lake of the Dismal Swamp; we should begin our career with a sigh, and end it with a groan; while cadaverous faces, and words to the tune of 'The Dead March in Saul,' would make up the whole interlude of our existence."
"Hume, the historian, in examining a French manuscript containing accounts of some private disbursements of King Edward II. of England, found, among others, one item of a crown paid to somebody for making the king laugh. Could one conceive of a wiser investment? Perhaps by paying one crown Edward saved another. 'The most utterly lost of all days,' says Chamfort, 'is that on which you have not once laughed.' Even that grimmest and most saturnine of men, who, though he made others roar with merriment, was never known to smile, and who died 'in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole'—Dean Swift—has called laughter 'the most innocent of all diuretics.' Yet the philosopher of Concord, R. W. Emerson, is reported as having said in a lecture: 'Laughter is to be avoided. Lord Chesterfield said that after he had come to the years of understanding he never laughed.' Lord Chesterfield would have had far more influence if, instead of repressing every inclination to laugh, he had now and then given his ribs a holiday—nay, if he had even roared outright; for it would have disabused the public of the notion that he never obeyed a natural impulse, but that everything he said and did was prestudied—done by square, rule, and compass. As it was, though he was confessedly the politest, best-bred, most insinuating man at court, yet he was regularly and invariably out-flanked and out-maneuvered by Sir Robert Walpole, who had the heartiest laugh in the kingdom, and by the Duke of Newcastle, who had the worst manners in the world. In commending laughter, we mean genuine laughter, not a make-believe, not the artificial or falsetto laugh of fashionable society, nor, again, the mere smile of acquiescent politeness, or the crackling of thorns under a pot, or the curl of the lips that indicates in the laughter a belief in his fancied superiority. Still less do we mean the hollow, mocking laugh of the cynic. The laughter which we would commend as healthful is not bitter, but kindly, genial, and sympathetic."
No Physiological Reason for Death.—"Dr. William A. Hammond, a prominent physician of New York, who has written several medical treatises, and was some years ago Surgeon-General of the United States Army, has recently set forth his belief that there is no physiological reason at the present day why man should die. He maintains that people die through the ignorance of the laws which govern their existence, and from their inability, or indisposition, to attend to those laws with which they are acquainted. Now, as the business of medical men has ostensibly been for the last four thousand years to prolong human life, and as Dr. Hammond affirms that there is no good reason why people should die, the wonder is why men of his school have not drawn up some formula by which they could live on for three or four thousand years, at least. There has always been a vague impression that the knowledge of the preservation of human life had been lost, and that in some favored era of the world's history that knowledge would be recovered.
"If there is such a thing as a hidden law of life, which, when discovered and asserted, will arrest physical decay and prevent death, except by accident, Doctor Hammond, and all who hold to his doctrine, ought to lose no time in making it known. This medical authority reasons that, as the human body is constantly dying and constantly renewing its particles, this law of displacement and renewal ought to be perpetual, and that when it is discovered just what substances are best fitted to maintain this equipoise, as it were, there should be no giving out of the physical powers.
"'The food that man takes into his stomach,' says Doctor Hammond, 'ought to be of such quantity and quality as would exactly repair the losses which, through the action of the several organs, his body is to undergo. If it is excessive in either of these directions, or if it is deficient, disease of some kind will certainly be the result. If he knew enough to be able to adjust his daily food to the expected daily requirements of his system, disease could never ensue through the exhaustion of any one of his vital organs. A large majority of the morbid affections to which he is subject are due to a lack of this knowledge.
"'Now, suppose that he is exactly right in his calculations, and that the food taken is neither too great nor too little, but exactly compensates the anticipated losses, the death of each cell in the brain, or the heart, or the muscles, etc., will be followed by the birth of a new cell, which will take its place and assume its functions. Gout, rheumatism, liver and kidney diseases, heart affections, softening and other destructive disorders of the brain, the various morbid conditions to which the digestive organs are subject, would be impossible except through the action of some external force, such as the swallowing of sulphuric acid, or a blow on the head, or a stab with a knife, which would come clearly within the class of accidents, and of course many of these would be avoidable.'
"Dr. Hammond's theory supposes that the time will come when the individual will have learned the uttermost thing about the laws of life, and when he will conform so strictly to these laws that he will have nothing more to learn in regard to the best way of living. It may require ages for this progress, but when it is attained, and the race is set free from all morbific influences, physical death would be impossible. The summary of his points is that 'people die from ignorance of the laws of life; and from willfulness in not obeying the laws they know.' That may be a part of the truth which is very near the surface. But the other demonstration is not quite so clear as could be wished—that there can be any such thing as an eternity of physical life, even if all the laws touching that life were known and every one of them obeyed."