About 280,000 babies under the age of one year die annually in the
United States. The average lifetime is only a little more than forty
years. It should be at least one hundred years. This is a very
conservative statement, for many live to be considerably older, and it
is within the power of each individual to prolong his life beyond what
is now considered old age.

Under favorable conditions people should live in comfort and health to
the age of one hundred years or more, useful and in full possession of
their faculties. Barring accidents, which should be less numerous when
people fully realize that unreasonable haste and speed are wasteful and
that life is more valuable than accumulated wealth, human life could and
should be a certainty. There should be no sudden deaths resulting from
the popular diseases of today. In fact, pneumonia, typhoid fever,
tuberculosis, cancer and various other ills that are fatal to the vast
majority of the race, should and could be abolished. This may sound
idealistic, but though such results are not probable in the near future,
they are possible.

All civilized nations of which we have record, except the Chinese, have
decayed after growing and flourishing a few centuries, usually about a
thousand years or less. Many reasons are given for the decline and fall
of nations. Rome especially furnishes food for much thought. However,
look into the history of each known nation that has risen to prominence,
glory and power, and you will find that so long as they kept in close
contact with the soil they flourished. With the advance of civilization
the peoples change their mode of life from simplicity to luxuriousness
and complexity. Thus individuals decay and in the end there is enough
individual decay to result in national degeneration. When this process