76 MAN THE ANIMAL 



in the third or senescent period of the life span. A large pro- 

 portion of persons over fifty years of age are also not capable, 

 alone and unaided, of getting their livings by their own eflforts 

 at those ages. They either cannot get jobs, or their vital mo- 

 mentum has so decreased as a result of previous illnesses, acci- 

 dents, or the natural processes of physical and mental decay 

 that they could not hold jobs if they had them. In short their 

 efforts do not achieve the subsistence level. The cynic may jibe 

 as much as he likes at the findings of the recent National Health 

 Survey {Prelim. Refts.y Sickness and Medical Care Ser.y Bull. 7, 

 193 8) y that the unemployed workers showed proportionally 

 twice as much disablement by illness as the employed workers j 

 and that the ratio was still higher as between unemployables 

 and employed j and as between older and younger groups in 

 the respective classes. Any sensible person knows that even 

 partial breakdown and wearing out of the bodily machinery is 

 bound to be a major variable in the determination not alone of 

 employability but also of intrinsic capability to get a living any 

 time or anywhere. 



The social and biological fact of overwhelming importance 

 is that the portion of the population falling in the reproductive 

 period, between the ages of fifteen and fifty, has to support a 

 great part of the rest of the population, the infants and the 

 old, as well as themselves. This burden includes both direct 

 expenditure at the time, that is while they are under fifty, and 

 also savings for their own old age, when they can no longer 

 work. And it must not be forgotten that intrinsically it makes 

 no essential difference whether the assumption of this burden 

 is directly and immediately segregated within the biological 

 family of parents, children, and grandparents, or is spread over 

 the whole social organization through the machinery of "social 

 security" so-called, or old age pension systems, or other similar 

 devices. It still remains the workers in the fifteen to fifty age 

 group that have got to carry the load, by and large, because 

 they are the only ones that produce the wealth that must pay 

 the cost of all the livings. This extraordinary overlapping of 



