144 NO STRUGGLE NO SELECTION 



young and vigorous settlers, while many elderly people 

 leave the colony to return to old and cherished 

 associations, and to spend their declining years in the 

 Mother Country. 



Thus the number of deaths that take place in New 

 Zealand does not, by their proportion to the existing 

 population, give anything like an accurate idea of the 

 average duration of human life in New Zealand. By 

 adventitious circumstances the proportion of deaths to 

 the population is rendered smaller than would be the 

 case if the conditions were normal. But there is also 

 another and contributory cause of the abnormal re- 

 lation existing between the given death-rate and the 

 population. When we consider that a population 

 numbering not much more than 800,000 souls occupy 

 a country almost as large as the United Kingdom, and 

 that not much more than a third part of it are gathered 

 into towns, there must be a considerable number of 

 people living on solitary farms, or small hamlets in 

 outlying districts, beyond the ken of registrars, many 

 of whom are likely to omit registering deaths that 

 occur in their households, though they may be careful 

 in seeing to the registration of births and marriages. 



It is not, in my opinion, reasonable to believe that, 

 in the present state of the world, even under the most 

 favourable conditions, the average duration of life 

 in any community exceeds seventy-five years. That 

 is the extreme limit I should be disposed to accept 

 as possible, though even then my acceptance would 

 be accompanied with suspicion. 



