448 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



The courts have arbitrarily placed the value of one productive male at 

 $5,000. This is estimated on the basis that the interest on $5,000 at 

 six per cent, is $300, the amount of wages which a man would earn at 

 $1 a day for three hundred working days. If then, the husband of a 

 family is killed by the railroad, and his wife secures a judgment of 

 $5,000, it is believed that she has obtained in this sum the equivalent 

 of his services to her and her children. This is not true. That life 

 was worth more than $5,000 to the family and to the nation. Few 

 common laborers in this country to-day earn less than $1.50 per day; 

 for three hundred working days this would be $450, which is 6 per 

 cent, of $7,500. But the wife in these days could not obtain 6 per 

 cent, interest on this sum in any safe investment. We will not here 

 speak of the progressive increase in the cost of living compatible with 

 the maintenance of self respect, a very important consideration. If 

 she could safely secure, in the Eastern States, at least, 4 per cent, she 

 could consider herself fortunate, and if the judgment instead of $5,000 

 should be $10,000, this at 4 per cent, would not amount to her hus- 

 band's annual wage. 



In the case of the death of a mechanic earning $2.50 per day, the 

 loss to the family and the state, computed on the 4-per-cent. basis, 

 would be represented in round numbers by the sum of $19,000. As we 

 advance in the social scale we find that intelligence begets increased 

 productivity, and increased productivity in the individual represents 

 to the state and to the family, the social unit, greater monetary value 

 as an asset. 



Some lives are of much greater value to society than are represented 

 merely by their physical and mental creative powers. How are we to 

 estimate the value of such lives as Lord Lister, Lady Henry Somerset, 

 Lincoln, Clara Barton, Edward Everett Hale, Charles W. Eliot, An- 

 drew Carnegie, Bishop Brooks, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Tolstoi? Not 

 in the value of their actual physical and mental productivity during 

 life can the estimate readily be made. Not even in the value of the 

 force of their example alone, but in the great impetus which such 

 personalities give to the realization of high ideals, the purification of 

 social and political life, and in the betterment and advancement of the 

 race are we to look for a just estimate of their worth. A worth which 

 it is impossible to calculate on a commercial basis. Yet these units 

 are subjected to practically the same chances of infection from con- 

 tagious diseases, and countless other dangers, as the average citizen. 

 It is not the duty of the state to provide special means for the pro- 

 tection and preservation of such lives, but to institute such general 

 measures as will reduce to the minimum such agencies as menace all 

 human life, thus saving to the service of the state lives of all classes 

 of society, the annual ruthless waste of which now amounts to hundreds- 



