average duration of life (and this means the material prosperity of the
people) has of late terribly decreased. While out of every hundred people
more die than was the case ten, twenty, thirty years ago, those who die
have lived a shorter time. Life is not now to be reckoned by its
"threescore years and ten." Its average duration in Boston is little above
twenty years; in New York it is less than twenty years. [Footnote: In
Boston, from 1810 to 1820, the average age of all that died was 27.85
years; in 1857, leaving deaths by casualty out of the calculation, it was
but 20.63 years; in 1858, it was 21.76. In New York, from 1810 to 1820, it
was 26.15; for the last ten years of which the statistics are known, it was
less than 20.] Is the diminution of the length of life to go on from year
to year?

This needless sacrifice and shortening of life, this accumulating amount of
ill health, causes an annual loss, in each of our great cities, of
productive capacity to the value of millions of dollars, as well as an
unnatural expense of millions more. This is no figure of speech. The
community is poorer by millions of dollars each year through the waste
which it allows of health and life. Leaving out of view all humane
considerations, all thought of the misery, social and moral, which
accompanies this physical degradation, and looking simply at its economical
effects, we find that it increases our taxes, diminishes our means of
paying them, creates permanent public burdens, and lessens the value of
property. An outlay of a million of dollars a year to reduce and to remove
the causes of these evils would be the cheapest and most profitable
expenditure of the public money by the municipal government. The principal
would soon be returned to the general treasury with all arrears of
interest.

The main causes of this great and growing misery are patent. The remedies