We do ill, if we fail in veneration for the past—rather, we do impiously, for it begot us, and we are of its blood. The man, the nation that can sneer at dead loves and dead enthusiasms is as if a son should kick his father downstairs, unnatural. To sneer at what is old-fashioned is an easy triumph, for the dead cannot plead in answer; cannot try to explain, far less succeed in explaining to us, what it felt like to wear those clothes, use that forgotten slang, cultivate those types and thrill to those ideals. True, their unchartered and undesired advocates, the praisers of the past, have done their cause disservice: youth will have its hit back at the greybeards for all the Polonius-tedium that boyhood endured, in forced silence. But our grandfathers were unwitting accomplices in the conspiracy of convention that then educated us; there was no attitudinizing about their faith, no _arrière pensée_ in their respectability. To them, as to us, the fashion of an age seemed a Providential culmination; they played ball against its brick enclosure without stopping to ask whether or no it cramped them. And if they could rise up to defend their case 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, “will one day seem uncouth, and frigid, and unimaginative: and brilliant essayists will ransack your gold for the dross in it, their flashlight will make the colour fade from your enthusiasms. 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 were: to see human nature, fashioned of the same clay and cast in the same primal 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 past; you came from it, and into it you go.”