STRANGE PROSPECTS

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXII, Issue 19437, 24 October 1925, Page 17 (Supplement)

STRANGE PROSPECTS

THE EFFECT OF LONGER LIFE “If cancer and heart affections can be kept down, and other makidies eliminated or very greatly reduced, we may get a death rate of perhaps five or six per thousand. The birth rate may be equally low. Should this happen, a curious state of things may arise,” writes Dr. W. Barr, medieval officer of health for Rotherdam, in his annual report. 41 The numerical balance will shift from youth to age. Fewer and fewer babies will be born, and more and more people will live to be sixty, seventy, eighty and upwards. The time will come when there will be more persons of both sexes over than under fifty. It will then be an elderly nation. Youth and middle lagc will be outnumbered in business, in the professions and at ballot boxes. The seniors •will preponderate and will set the pace, rather a slow' one; and of those seniors the majority will be ladies from fifty upwards, as the female expectations of life is far higher than the. male. Eventually, other nations will do Jhe same. But Britain will reach the goal first because of our lower death rate and I higher ratio of female longevity. We shall be swayed by aged women and elderly men sooner than our rivals and competitors. Shall w r e gain or lose by the evolution?”