In other words, we are still furiously burning the candle at both ends—slower at one but faster at the other.
It is important that this point should be clearly understood. It is natural to conclude at first glance that if we are saving these lives of the younger age period that naturally there are more older people to die, but that does not follow. In the first place, we are dealing with a death rate, the death rate for 1,000 population not in the bulk, and while it is true that the passing of these lives over into the older age period does affect that rate, it only affects it slightly. It has been asserted also that the lives saved from these communicable diseases have been weakened and that they die early after passing into middle life. It is also true that that does not explain the extraordinary increase in the death rate in the older age period. In England and Wales they have the same reduction in the death rate of communicable diseases common to the earlier age period, but not any increase above forty.
With all its blessings modern civilization has introduced hazards, habits and conditions of life which may not only invite, but which have increased in many ways, physical, mental and moral degeneracy.
What excuse have we Americans to offer for the excessive waste of human efficiency and human life from which the Nation is now suffering?
Surely we can not plead ignorance nor poverty, for we have both the knowledge and the money wherewith to stop this annual sacrifice.
How can we explain our growing contempt for the value and sacredness of human life? There is no other civilized country where this greatest of all assets—the most precious gift of the Almighty,—is held so cheaply as in this glorious land of ours.
And why do we continue to view with indifference the constantly multiplying evidences of the mental and physical degeneracy of our race?
We may agree that in the long run the trend of humanity is ever upward, and that this is but a temporary reaction, but can we afford to rest wholly upon the hope that race deterioration will automatically cease when our people have had time to adjust themselves to modern conditions? Wise men doubt it. This problem will not solve itself; this adverse tendency will be checked only when our people are made to see conditions as they actually exist, and are aroused to the need of correcting them.
This is our task. Let us briefly survey it.
In order to measure the effectiveness of the Nation’s life Conservation work, and the magnitude of the task remaining undone, we must now compare our efforts not with those of the past, nor with those of other communities or countries, but with our present loss from preventable and postponable sickness and mortality.