the most
interesting, or the most dignified employment of our powers. We look
upon it as a necessary duty to be discharged before we can fully devote
ourselves to the higher exercise of our faculties, the intellectual and
spiritual enjoyments and pursuits which alone mean life. Everything
possible is indeed done by the just distribution of burdens, and by all
manner of special attractions and incentives to relieve our labor of
irksomeness, and, except in a comparative sense, it is not usually
irksome, and is often inspiring. But it is not our labor, but the
higher and larger activities which the performance of our task will
leave us free to enter upon, that are considered the main business of
existence.

"Of course not all, nor the majority, have those scientific, artistic,
literary, or scholarly interests which make leisure the one thing
valuable to their possessors. Many look upon the last half of life
chiefly as a period for enjoyment of other sorts; for travel, for
social relaxation in the company of their life-time friends; a time for
the cultivation of all manner of personal idiosyncrasies and special
tastes, and the pursuit of every imaginable form of recreation; in a
word, a time for the leisurely and unperturbed appreciation of the good
things of the world which they have helped to create. But, whatever the
differences between our individual tastes as to the use we shall put
our leisure to, we all agree in looking forward to the date of our
discharge as the time when we shall first enter upon the full enjoyment
of our birthright, the period when we shall first really attain our
majority and become enfranchised from discipline and control, with the
fee of our lives vested in ourselves. As eager boys in your day
anticipated twenty-one, so men nowadays look forward to forty-five. At
twenty-one we become men, but at forty-five we renew youth. Middle age
and what you would have called old age are considered, rather than
youth, the enviable time of life. Thanks to the better conditions of
existence nowadays, and above all the freedom of every one from care,
old age approaches many years later and has an aspect far more benign
than in past times. Persons of average constitution usually live to
eighty-five or ninety, and at forty-five we are physically and mentally
younger, I fancy, than you were at thirty-five. It is a strange
reflection that at forty-five, when we are just entering upon the most
enjoyable period of