That evening I sat up for some time after the ladies had retired,
talking with Dr. Leete about the effect of the plan of exempting men
from further service to the nation after the age of forty-five, a
point brought up by his account of the part taken by the retired
citizens in the government.
"At forty-five," said I, "a man still has ten years of good manual
labor in him, and twice ten years of good intellectual service. To be
superannuated at that age and laid on the shelf must be regarded
rather as a hardship than a favor by men of energetic dispositions."
"My dear Mr. West," exclaimed Dr. Leete, beaming upon me, "you cannot
have any idea of the piquancy your nineteenth century ideas have for
us of this day, the rare quaintness of their effect. Know, O child of
another race and yet the same, that the labor we have to render as our
part in securing for the nation the means of a comfortable physical
existence is by no means regarded as the most important, 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 lifetime 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 life, you
already began to think of growing old and to look backward. With you
it was the forenoon, with us it is the afternoon, which is the
brighter half of life."
After this I remember that our talk branched into the subject of
popular sports and recreations at the present time as compared with
those of the nineteenth century.
"In one respect," said Dr. Leete, "there is a marked difference. The
professional sportsmen, which were such a curious feature of your day,
we have nothing answering to, nor are the prizes for which our
athletes contend money prizes, as with you. Our contests are always
for glory only. The generous rivalry existing between the various
guilds, and the loyalty of each worker to his own, afford a constant
stimulation to all sorts of games and matches by sea and land, in
which the young men take scarcely more interest than the honorary
guildsmen who have served their time. The guild yacht races off
Marblehead take place next week, and you will be able to judge for
yourself of the popular enthusiasm which such events nowadays call out
as compared with your day. The demand for '_panem et circenses_'
preferred by the Roman populace is recognized nowadays as a wholly
reasonable one. If bread is the first necessity of life, recreation is
a close second, and the nation caters for both. Americans of the
nineteenth century were as unfortunate in lacking an adequate
provision for the one sort of need as for the other. Even if the
people of that period had enjoyed larger leisure they would, I fancy,
have often been at a loss how to pass it agreeably. We are never in
that predicament."