“Ailments? No. The need for that has long since vanished. Humanity has no ailments now. The extremity of human life has been proved to stand at one hundred and forty-five years, three months, two weeks, one day, four hours, six minutes, and thirteen and two-fifths of a second. Everybody attains to that age as a matter of course. Then we stop, or cease, or, as you might say, die. Inoculation, pursued through the centuries, has banished every physical ill but Death itself; and that has no terrors at a hundred and forty-five. The hour of extinction once known, an orderly exit naturally follows. But surely you must have wakened from or be walking in a dream? I shall hear you speak of small-pox presently--indeed you have done so--and those other long-vanished curses bred out of the black night of man’s first ignorance. To-day, however, Inoculation has climbed heights beyond your primitive imagination, my friend; to-day--upon this glad anniversary--the rising generation, after having been from childhood subject to the study and scrutiny of our wisest ones, receives its finishing touch, its crown, its keystone--each man, each woman according to their need. _We inoculate for character now!_ Think of all that means, if your intellect has a power sufficiently vivid to do so. To-day we celebrate the stupendous discovery that rose naturally out of Jenner’s sublime achievement. Evolution, proceeding through the ages, has brought us face to face with the fact, and thus, having counteracted heredity and stamped out disease, man proceeded into the subtler psychological field of human character and temperament. To-day we create disposition and mould mind. Education has done all that education can do for the generation you behold passing in its youthful glory before you; now the necessary correctives of character will be administered by inoculation.” “You can add or subtract, give or take away!” I cried; and he admitted that it was so and gazed curiously at my enthusiasm. “You are excited,” he said. “I am fortunate to have witnessed such a phenomenon. The emotion of excitement has been removed from human nature for three or four hundred years. Yet I warn you: it shortens life.” “Never mind that; tell me more, much more!” I begged.