the less appropriate because
the pupil-teacher taught badly and learnt under difficulties.

It may seem to be a crowning feat of platitude to write that "we have
to remember" this, but it is overlooked in a whole mass of legal, social
and economic literature. Those extraordinary imaginary cases as between
a man A and a man B who start level, on a desert island or elsewhere,
and work or do not work, or save or do not save, become the basis
of immense schemes of just arrangement which soar up confidently and
serenely regardless of the fact that never did anything like that equal
start occur; that from the beginning there were family groups and old
heads and young heads, help, guidance and sacrifice, and those who had
learnt and those who had still to learn, jumbled together in confused
transactions. Deals, tradings and so forth are entirely secondary
aspects of these primaries, and the attempt to get an idea of abstract
relationship by beginning upon a secondary issue is the fatal pervading
fallacy in all these regions of thought. At the present moment the
average age of the world is I suppose about 21 or 22, the normal death
somewhen about 44 or 45, that is to say nearly half the world is "under
age," green, inexperienced, demanding help, easily misled and put in
the wrong and betrayed. Yet the younger moiety, if we do indeed assume
life's object is a collective synthesis, is more important than the
older, and every older person bound to be something of a guardian to the
younger. It follows directly from the fundamental beliefs I have assumed
that we are missing the most important aspects of life if we are not
directly or indirectly serving the young, helping them individually
or collectively. Just in the measure that one's living falls away from
that, do we fall away from life into a mere futility of existence, and
approach the state, the extraordinary and wonderful middle state of (for
example) those extinct and entirely damned old gentlemen one sees and
hears eating and sleeping in every comfortable London club.

That constructive synthetic purpose which I have made the ruling idea in
my scheme of conduct may be indeed completely restated in another form,
a form I adopted for a book I wrote some years ago called "Mankind in
the Making." In this I pointed out that "Life is a tissue of births";

"and if the whole of life is an evolving succession of births, then
not only must a man in his individual capacity (physicall