As to this, nothing is known, and it
is improbable that there is anything to know. But it has usually been
forgotten, so far as I am aware, that the disparity of age has a very
marked and real consequence, which is, in its turn, the cause of many
more consequences.
We have seen that the male death-rate is higher than the female
death-rate. At all ages, whether before birth or after it, the male
expectation of life is less than the female. This is more conspicuously
true than ever now that the work of Lord Lister, based upon that of
Pasteur, has so enormously lowered the mortality in childbirth. Even
now that mortality is falling, and will rapidly fall for some time to
come, still further increasing the female advantage in expectation of
life; the more especially this applies to married women. If now, this
being the natural fact, we have most husbands older than their wives,
it follows that in a great preponderance of cases the husband will die
first; and so we have produced the phenomenon of widowhood. The greater
the seniority of the husband, the more widowhood will there be in a
society. Every economic tendency, every demand for a higher standard of
life, every aggravation for the struggle for existence, every increment
of the burden of the defective-minded, tending to increase the man's age
at marriage, which, on the whole, involves also increasing his
seniority--contributes to the amount of widowhood in a nation.
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