rward to usefulness until eighty, at least, and now are
encouraged to feel that one hundred years is the natural span of life.
There are, it is true, few really important studies of how to keep
people from growing senile and really old before the time now set for
failure of powers. Such studies, however, are prophesied in a small
"endowment for the study of diseases of the aged" already given, and
more in the statement of appeals for increase of such endowment. The
tendency now is setting strongly not only toward the lengthening of
life but toward the lengthening of the mental and physical power that
alone makes long life desirable.

We shall see more and more of this interest as medical science reaches
out further and further toward lessening all the ills that flesh is
heir to.

Meanwhile, what is the actual condition in the various strata of life,
in our own country, for example, in respect to the protection, the
care, the comfort, the happiness, and the general welfare of the aged?
In the first place, the speeding up of machinery has made many manual
workers prematurely old. The worst thing, perhaps, about child-labor
has been that, owing to premature "laying off" of the fathers, the
children have been set to earn money for family needs, and have
acquired, with their pay envelope, a contempt or disrespect for the
father in ways that have reversed the natural relationship and given
society much use for the Children's Court. This disrespect shown the
father, even when he is only of middle age, passes on in increased
measure to the grandfather who has been pushed aside from self-support
and family support while still comparatively young and has never been
able to again catch on to the wheels of industry. The fact that he
eats and does not work; that he takes space in the crowded tenement
and does not aid in paying its rent; that he has no light employment
that can give his fading mental powers an impulse toward ambition and
energy, all make the position of the grandfather in many homes of
struggling poverty a most unhappy one. In such homes the grandmother
is often still seen to be really useful. She may make it possible for
the young mother to earn outside the home. She may, if skilled in
sewing, ease the expense of ready-made clothes. She may, at least, and
usually does, relieve the mother of much care of the babies. There are
several reasons why more aged men are sent to public institutions for
final care than aged