From The Times January 3, 1923
For the eighth year in succession a correspondent has gathered from the obituary lists on our front pages all the records of persons who have reached the age of ninety years or more. The annual average for the period has been 303, the women being rather more than twice as many as the men. There have been 36 centenarians. The recorded ages of men and animals are usually much shorter than the maximum duration of life assigned in popular belief.
No valid evidence supports the authenticity of claims such as that made for Thomas Parr, the Shropshire peasant, of having reached his 153rd year, and any cases of exceeding the century by more than two or three years are dubious. A century must be taken as the utmost span of life which any human being can hope at present to achieve. But that is 20 years more than the “four-score” of the beautiful psalm in the Burial Service, and evidence based on wider statistics shows that increasing numbers of the modern population attain it.
Metchikov believed that better conditions, more prudent habits, and the conquest of diseases by science might come to keep the human body and mind strong and healthy to an age still greater, and that then a natural instinct would acquiesce in the coming of death as readily as youth now accepts the coming of maturity. Such optimism is for the future; for the few who attain it, great age is more often but labour and sorrow.
What concerns most of us is that the average longevity, the broad-based expectation of life of insurance statistics, is continuously expanding, and that there may be a close connexion between the greater expectation of human life under modern conditions and the postponement of the average age of marriage and reduction in the average number of children.
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But if most of us are to have more of life, and a few much more of it, is the gift worth having? The days and the years of modern life are more crowded than in any other age and yet, possibly because of the increase of experiences, they seem shorter. The period of the war was fuller for all who lived through it than any other time of their lives, and yet the beginning and the end have closed like the pages of a book. Life, indeed, seems shorter the more intensely it is lived.
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