We do ill, if we fail in veneration for the future—rather, we do impiously, for we beget it, and it is of our blood. The man, the nation that can sneer at unborn loves and unborn enthusiasms is as if a father should kick his son downstairs, unnatural. To sneer at what is new-fangled is an easy triumph, for the unborn cannot plead in answer; cannot try to explain, far less succeed in explaining to us, what it will feel like to wear those clothes, use that unimagined slang, cultivate those types and thrill to those ideals. True, their unchartered and undesired advocates, the praisers of the future, have done their cause disservice: old age will have its hit back at the coxcombs for all the H. G. Wells-tedium that manhood endured, in forced silence. But our grandsons will be unwitting accomplices in the conspiracy of unconventionality that now educates us: there will be no attitudinizing about their scepticism, no _arrière pensée_ in their immorality. To them, as to us, the fashion of the age will seem a Providential culmination: they will play hide-and-seek in its shadowy confines without stopping to ask whether or no they are lost in them. And if they could come down to defend their cause against us, they would surely remonstrate with us by appealing to us to do as we would be done by: “Your own times, too,” they would say, “used one day to seem uncouth, and hectic, and over-emotional: and brilliant pessimists disproved the possibility of doing what you did, before you had time to do it. Learn to forget that we were ever held up to you as models of what men should be: remember only that we are pictures of what men will be: to see human nature, fashioned of the same clay and cast in the same ultimate mould as yourselves, living in other conditions and reacting upon a situation that is not yours, may be tedious indeed, but not altogether unprofitable. Do not despise the future; you go into it, and from you it comes.”