YOUTH'S HERITAGE.

Waikato Times, Volume 98, Issue 16174, 27 December 1924, Page 4

YOUTH'S HERITAGE.

There was probably never yet a generation of time-worn elders that did no.t look upon the youth of its clay as stubborn, wilful, and foolishly impervious to the wisdom of experienced age. There was certainly never yet a generation of impetuous youth that did not look upon its seniors as hidebound, obstructive, and effete. In other days youth's straining at the leash of elderly authority was more veiled and indirect. To-day youth does not shrink from speaking with the adversary in

the gate. The giddy pace of world events in these latter years, and the obligation inescapably laid upon the peoples to disentangle right from wrong, to choose between them, and to take the stupendous consequences, have made the rising generation quick to see their looming responsibilities, unusually articulate about them, and firmly set on mapping a conscious course and steering it for themselves. They reject the claims of any elder statesmen to lay down the law and to mark the bounds for them. They are not overawed by the ipse dixit of any authority. If they ask for help at all, it is only for help to help themselves. In clear tones they "Summon age to grant youth's heritage." As an undergraduate speaker recently put it at a public meeting, youth asks for trust and for a chance to make its own mistakes. And, of course, both must be given to it. The demand is for no

more than its rightful inheritance. Battered middle-age, looking back wearily on its own tempestuous passage, longs to spare the rising generation all the storms it can. It would have them start from the height to which it has* itself laboriously climbed. None other ip. the father's feeling for the son whose tender steps he yearns to plant securely in the larger foothold which he has carved out for himself. The impulse is natural, but its foundations are infirm. It implies a material and even mechanical view of the making of a soul. It assumes that wisdom and character can be willed away like so much land or money. It would bequeath a youth a royal road into its kingdom, instead of the old and thorny path of doubts, heart-

searchings, and wrestlings of the spirit. It would impose a peace of the soul which youth would call a desert of lethargy and stagnation. ■ For heritage is not the rounded arid flawless system, or the all-embracing formula. The very law of its growth is that it shall by its own blood and tears test every dogma, prove every precept. Cautious age may even relearn a lesson from the innocents whom it seeks to save and shelter. The years blur the perception that strife and pain are not sheer loss, but are rather the conditions of advance. Anaesthesia is no less alarming a symptom in the moral sphere than in the physical. Settled

comfortably into the hard shell of convention, habit, and tradition, a man may pride himself on being proof at last against the slings and arrows of doubt and fearfulness. But the price of his immunity is the forfeiting of the power of further growth. One who has husbanded the heritage of youth should still be ready to cry, even with failing breath —"Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!"