Democratic Sentinel, Volume 5, Number 31, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 September 1881 — The Value of Life. [ARTICLE]

The Value of Life.

One of the interesting speculations recently started in England has for & subject the present value of life as compared with its value when mankind did not spend half of its time in studying the problem of prolonging life. One of the leading London physicians declares that men were happier and better, and lived nobler lives, before the pursuit of health and the yearnings for longevity became a craze almost amounting to madness, and before the questions what to eat, drink and to avoid, and what to wear, and how to live, by what means to avoid infection, to keep off disease, and to escape death for a few weary and wearied years, were the all-engrossing ones. Another urges that the “ survival of the fittest,” so far as the race is concerned, is a great mistake ; and that humanity in general would be a great deal better off if there were less of the loving labor new expended in prolonging the lives of the weak, diseased and crippled. There is no danger that either of these views will find general acceptance. The world has become so accustomed to studying the laws of health and long life, and enjoys the study so much, that it is not likely to abandon it, even for the purpose of bringing back the happy days when men didn’t care anything about diet and drainage and pure air. There is just as little danger of any retrogression in the matter of caring for the sick and helpless. It may be worse for tlie race, in one aspect of the case, to prolong lives of suffering and to interfere with the natural process which extinguishes the weaklings in a few generations. But what the race loses in this way it is repaid an hundredfold in the cultivation and expansion of its finer emotions. —Detroit Free Press.