But it is not improbable that the Romans made some deduction from what they knew to be the real value of life among the citizens of Rome, on account of the use of the money appropriated to the aliment, which the purchaser of the estate retained in his own hands. It has been shown that the average mortality at present at Ostend is one in thirty-six; which is the same thing as to assert that a new-born child at Ostend has an expectation of thirty-five and a half years of life. The Roman allowance from birth, à primâ ætate, was thirty years. If we suppose the Romans deducted from the real value of life five and a half years for the interest of money, it would bring the Roman allowance and the duration of life at Ostend to the same. The like deduction at the age of seventeen would likewise bring the probability of life in both cases to the same. It is not likely that the Romans, without any record of the individual facts, and acting only on a general principle of utility, the best they could find, would make any variation for the intermediate years of childhood and youth: consequently the presumption is, that the duration of life at Rome, 1300 years ago, was very much the same as it is throughout Europe at the present day. This estimate, however, for the reasons already assigned, includes only the resident citizens of Rome, the male sex, and the higher classes. What the mortality was at Rome among the lower class, including the slaves—what it was in the Roman provinces, and in the less civilized countries of that age—we have no means of forming even a conjecture. What it was in Europe during the succeeding ages of barbarism we do not know. In civilized Rome, the value of life had probably reached a very high point; in barbarian Europe we may be sure it fell to an exceedingly low point. From that low point, in civilized Europe, it has been slowly but gradually rising, until, in modern times, the whole mass of the European population has, to say the very least, reached the highest point attained by the select class in ancient Rome. But in some favoured spots in Europe, the whole mass has advanced considerably beyond the select class in ancient Rome. In England, for example, the expectation of life, at the present day, for the mass of the people, as compared with that of the mass at Ostend, which, as has been shown, is the same as that of the whole of Europe, is as follows:—
| At | birth | 41½ | years. |
| At | 12 | 46¾ | |
| 17 | 41½ | ||
| 22 | 38⅜ | ||
| 27 | 35¼ | ||
| 32 | 32 | ||
| 37 | 28¾ | ||
| 42 | 25½ | ||
| 47 | 22¼ | ||
| 52 | 19 | ||
| 57 | 16 | ||
| 62 | 13 | ||
| 67 | 10½ | ||
| 72 | 8 | ||
| 77 | 6 |
It should be borne in mind that the females of the mass exceed in duration the lives of the males at every age by two or three years.
The earliest statistical document bearing on the rate of mortality, in any European nation, emerging from the state of barbarism, appears to be a manuscript of the fourteenth century, relating to the mortality of Paris, from which M. Villermé has calculated that the mortality of Paris at that period was one in sixteen. How the individual facts contained in this manuscript were collected, from which M. Villermé's calculation is made, does not appear; and it makes the mortality so excessive as to be altogether incredible. Yet a statement scarcely less extraordinary is made with regard to Stockholm, in the middle of the last century. From a table given by Dr. Price, vol. ii., p. 411, it appears that, for all Sweden, between the years 1756 and 1763, the expectation of life
Of males at birth, was Females,
33¼ years.35¾ years.
while at the same time it was at Stockholm,
For males at birth,Females,
14¼ years.18 years.
Whereas, for the twenty years preceding 1800, it
was, for all Sweden, at birth,
MalesFemales,
34¾37½ years.