LIVING TO ONE HUNDRED

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXVII, Issue 4985, 9 June 1926, Page 4

LIVING TO ONE HUNDRED

WHAT WOULD BE THE RESULT. A PROPHECY >OF CALAMITY. According to a,n American scientist we are ultimately to achieve] an average li'fe span of around a hundred years. The prophecy is one easy to uphold—or to combat. Yet, since men even in this era do achieve that length of years, and sometimes' go beyond it ,wc may suppose that the ulti.mate conquest, of disea.se may confer an average; life-span of a hundred years. But the visions such a consummation opens up are not altogether entrancing. To-day, because of the overpopulation of Europe, we are experiencing periodic w.ars which, all other causes aside, resolve themselves into contests, between ' overcrowded countries for the right to expand a,nd find room for their populations. And this at a period when the average life-span is around fifty ! It takes not. very vivid imagination to conjectura what will be the condition of the world’s surface a thousand yea.rs from now. For pestilences have been conquered and man breeds with a security never before enjoyed, by the huniaiii race. The overcrowding of the earth is a problem which does not lie with the remote future, but with the near future. The increase in population among the virile races is terrific ; but consider the calamitous result which must come about if science finds a way of prolonging life to a century !

Sooner or later this globe will reach its saturation point; it will reach the time when the maximum number of consuming human beings will be born to strive for existence upon its fertile, surfa.ee. To imagine the condition of affairs when death no longer removes the old, but leaves them to cumber the path of the uprising generation needs the. pen of a Zola. On the North American continent, where, despite the teeming millions df the United States, there, is still a vast amount of space for fresh population, while Canada stretches out her empty prairie under the sun, there is no boundary problem. The' reason is simple, endugh. The United States have not reached the population saturation, point and Canada is far from it. Those two countries, therefore, live together peacefully. What would happen—what will happen—when our American prophet’s prophecy comes true ? The result may be imagined. If men are to achieve an average life-span df a century, then an artificial check upon population will be necessary, not as a choice, but as a necessity.