OUR WONDERFUL AGE.

Northland Age, Volume V, Issue 23, 1 February 1909, Page 2 (Supplement)

OUR WONDERFUL AGE.

WE NEVER GROW OLD. There never was an age when people were so interested in themselves as we. Physical, mental, and spiritual feelings are the commonplace* of conversion. We are all agreed that it is very unhealthy. Introspection into body, mind, and emotion is unanimously' condemned as fruitful in the imagination of ills, unanimously practised as extremely interesting, and nobody seems a penny the worse. Wo are used to hearing that this is an unhealthy age, that our diet and our digestion ' our nerves and our tempers, are all 1 wrong, that most of .us have come to believe with the same sort of faith we accord to statements that there is radium in the sun or sand 1 in the Sahara, or others which we have no opportunity of testing, and which do not directly affect the in- ■ come tax. While the truth is that if you compare this generation with the ages 1 of the past you find it uncommonly ■ vigorous. In the eighteenth century everybody who was anybody began to have gout as soon as they were out of their teens. The intimate letters of the period contain a whole ' gallery of pathetic pictures of youthful valetudinarians. 1 If you go further back and examine the quaint documents in which the 1 housewives of Stuart days communicated their recipes and their emotions, you find only one thing more surprising than tno early age at which they married, and that is the early age at which they died. To look still further into history ■ is to come to a time when old age, 1 as wo understand it now, was all L but unknown. The great men of Plantagenet days died worn out at ' an age which finds modern statest men just aspiring to the front 1 bench. } Y outh never endured so long as now. Heroes and heroines in novels : and on the stage are a decade or so older than they were a century ‘ ago, and it is no mere bull to sia3 r that they grow older every year. ; But to construe this as meaning that ■ a weary world us tired of youth is wholly an error. What it does mean is that we have learnt that youth has no fixed boundaries. The discovery that the right 1 reading of “Whom the gods love die young,” is “Whom the gods love ' never grow old” has been reserved > for our generation. Far from civilisation being played 1 out, there never was a time when health and strength and the driving l power of youth lasted so late in life.—' ‘Telegraph.' ’