 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 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
