MORTALITY IN AMERICA AND IN ENGLAND.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXV, Issue 9022, 7 April 1888, Page 2 (Supplement)

MORTALITY IN AMERICA AND IN ENGLAND.

Outside of New York and a few other large towns the vital statistics of this country are too incomplete for any trustworthy comparison of American with English mortality, but the London Lancet obtains from the statistics of life assurance companies trustworthy data for comparing the duration of life here and there. A few years ago tables were published showing the actual experience of thirty of our life assurance companies with more than 600,000 policies, a number large enouerb for valuable generalisation. It appears from thie table that the expectation of life of insured males in the United States at 20years of ag-e is 421 years and of females 40-8 years. Similar English statistics make the expectation there precisely the same in the case of women, but one year less in the case of men. This greater expectation of life for American men is maintained until the advanced age of 84 is reached, when the difference in our favour disappears. With women between 40 or 47 the expectation of life is somewhat greater here than in England, but after 47 the difference is slightly in favour of England. In this country the expectation of life is lower among insured women than among insured men after the age of 53, while in England after the age of 35 the advantage is with the women and continues increasingly to the end of life. Of course insured lives are picked lives, the people obtaining policies being men and women who have been subjected to a medical examination to determine their general physical soundness. They are also individuals who are removed from dangers to life and health incident to poverty, and a large part of them belong to the portion of society whose chances of life are always best—the people of moderate but sufficient incomes derived from salaries and occupations in which they are not subjected to the strain and friction of affairs that break down life by over-anxiety. It is true that of recent years policies of life assurance have been largely taken out by men in active and vexatious business as a measure of precaution against its perils, and also for the securing of creditors, but the system commends itself more especially to men with stated incomes as providing a method by which they oan leave something to their families. But as it is here, so it is in England, and therefore the Lancet's comparison is very valuable and suggestive. It seems to show, for one thing, that the talk of the greater strain of life here is not supported by the facts, American men in correspondinc positions having a little better chance of life than Englishmen.—New York Sun.