This premature effacement entails on society a double loss—first, the loss interiorly of that individual happiness which intensifies and raises the tide of life; second, the loss of activities guided by and based upon _mellow experience_. Society is too materialistic to recognize that human beings physically on the down-grade may be psychically on the up-grade, and pre-eminently fitted to inspire and promote progress. But in thinking of latent possibilities realizable in a better environment we are bound not to judge by average humanity, but by the superior types of the preceding generation. The old age of W. E. Gladstone, Harriet Martineau, Mary Somerville, and others was neither gloomy nor unproductive. The last-mentioned at the age of eighty-one turned her attention to writing a book on microscopic science. “I seemed,” she says, “to resume the perseverance and energy of my youth. I began it with courage, though I did not think I could live to finish it.” She did, however, finish it, and lived to the age of ninety-two, maintaining at all times her habits of study and a full social intercourse with many friends. (From _Personal Recollections_, by her Daughter.) It is not intellectual powers only that are running to waste. Under the double pressure of competition in trade and competition in the labour market, good manual workers are found ineffective and dismissed at an earlier age than formerly. An immense mass of our industrial population is forced by circumstance into the workhouse when still comparatively active, and life there is but a gloomy vacant existence—a complete suppression of the best faculties of body and mind. Comparing the past with the present in respect of the old age of workers, we are told by Professor Thorold Rodgers that village homes were centres of multifarious occupations, in which naturally the aged, if able, would take part. And in towns, although streets were narrow, at the rear of the houses there were gardens where old and young together spent the long summer evenings. “Not long ago,” says the American Social Science Committee Report of 1878, “the farm found constant employment for the men of the family—the women had abundant employment in the home, there was carding, spinning, weaving.” “And the neverending labour of our grandmothers must not be forgotten, who with nimble needle knit our stockings and mittens. The knitting-needle was in as constant play as their tongues, whose music only ceased under the power of sleep.... Now no more does the knitting-needle keep time to the music of their tongues, for the knitting-machine in the hands of one little girl will do more work than fifty grandmothers. Labour-saving machinery has broken up and destroyed our whole system of household and family manufacture, when all took part in the labour and shared in the product to the comfort of all.”