"The next great task of preventive medicine is the inauguration of
universal periodic medical examinations as an indispensable means for the
control of all diseases, whether arising from injurious personal habits,
from congenital or constitutional weakness, or from social and vocational
conditions." That this declaration by the Commissioner of Health of the
city of New York is not the mere expression of an individual opinion,
there is abundant evidence. And no one who has watched the growth of other
movements towards such regulation of life as only a few years ago would
have seemed wholly outside the domain of practical probability can doubt
that the "Life Extension" movement, as thus outlined, will rapidly grow
into prominence. Nor is there much room for doubt that, whether explicitly
contemplated at present or not, compulsion as well as universality is
tacitly implied in the movement.

I say that the movement is sure to grow into prominence, that it is a
thing which must be seriously reckoned with; I do not say that it will
march straight on to victory, or even that it is sure to prevail in the
end. It is instructive, in this regard, to hark back to a recent
experience in a more special, but yet an extremely important, domain.
Several years ago a report on university efficiency was issued under the
auspices--though, it should be added, without the official endorsement--of
the Carnegie Foundation. The central feature of this report lay in its
advocacy of the application to universities of those principles of system
and of standardization which have been successfully applied on a large
scale to the promotion of industrial efficiency, and are generally
referred to by the catch-word, "scientific management." In spite of the
merits of the report in certain matters of detail, and of the high
standing of the expert who wrote it in his own department of industrial
engineering, the report evoked an almost universal chorus of contemptuous
rejection not only in university circles, but also from those organs of