The average expectation of life for man varies in different countries in direct proportion to the application of efficient principles of hygiene and sanitation. In India, for instance, where sanitation is low and the majority of the population live, like Kim, on “the ravellings of circumstance,” the average duration of life is less than twenty-five years. In Sweden and Denmark, where life is methodical and ideals are high, and the Government takes up the ash-heaps regularly, a normal man may expect to live more than seventy years. In Massachusetts, which is the only one of our States to furnish us with reliable statistics, the average duration of life is forty-five years. Wherever sanitary science is active, the length of life is steadily increasing. In India it is stationary; in Europe it has doubled in the last 350 years; in New York, as we have seen, it has doubled within the last half-century. Despite the many obstacles, it seems likely that when the next general census is taken the death-rate of the metropolis will be down to thirteen per thousand. With such a rate, every person in the city may expect to live to be seventy years old. And most of them will say, “Isn’t that old enough?” [Illustration] [Illustration] THE ILLUSION OF PROGRESS[2] BY KENYON COX In these days all of us, even Academicians, are to some extent believers in progress. Our golden age is no longer in the past, but in the future. We know that our early ancestors were a race of wretched cave-dwellers, and we believe that our still earlier ancestors were possessed of tails and pointed ears. Having come so far, we are sometimes inclined to forget that not every step has been an advance, and to entertain an illogical confidence that each future step must carry us still further forward; having indubitably progressed in many things, we think of ourselves as progressing in all. And as the pace of progress in science and in material things has become more and more rapid, we have come to expect a similar pace in art and letters, to imagine that the art of the future must be far finer than the art of the present or than that of the past, and that the art of one decade, or even of one year, must supersede that of the preceding decade or the preceding year, as the 1913 model in automobiles supersedes the model of 1912. More than ever before “To have done, is to hang quite out of fashion,” and the only title to consideration is to do something quite obviously new or to proclaim one’s intention of doing something newer. The race grows madder and madder. It is hardly two years since we first heard of “Cubism” and already the “Futurists” are calling the “Cubists” reactionary. Even the gasping critics, pounding manfully in the rear, have thrown away all impedimenta of traditional standards in the desperate effort to keep up with what seems less a march than a stampede.