The old most of all need personal provision and suffer most from mass treatment, for they are not a class but are hyperindividualized. Not only do some become old while they are yet young in years, and vice versa, but there is the greatest diversity in food, regimen, and in most bodily and psychic needs. To say nothing of disposition, diathesis, or temperament, the old often develop what seem to others senseless idiosyncrasies that are really expressive of essential traits and require not only kindly consideration but careful study. It is hard for them, most of all for old women, to be deprived of contact with the young and to be confined to intercourse with only those of their own generation. It is also hard on them to be denied the privilege of privacy at will, of having certain things all their own, with a secure place accessible to them alone in which to keep them. For myself I am convinced that the so-called moroseness of old age is largely due to the inconsiderate treatment it receives. Its real instinct is to serve no less than to conserve. Even in the best appointed homes for the aged that I have visited the great need seems to me to be occupation with things felt to be useful and individual exemptions from rigid rules mechanically enforced for all. All have their own tastes, aptitudes, habits, as well as mementos and keepsakes, which should always be respected, and every possible facility should be given not only for visits and correspondence but for current reading in order to maintain a larger surface of contact with the world without. The old thus constitute, in a sense, a privileged and even a new “leisure class,” which Veblen omitted to characterize. The very fact that they have survived means that they have borne the burden and heat of life’s trying day better than those who have died. In a large over-all sense, thus, they survived because they were the fittest and even though they may have wrought solely with an eye to their own personal benefit they have, nevertheless, helped on the world’s work. Our streets, buildings, machines, farms, mines, goods, produce, means of transportation--all these are, in a sense, the bequest of vanished and retiring to future generations, and even whatever stamina their children have is more or less due to their virtue, while their very longevity is perhaps the best of all they have transmitted to their offspring for, as A. G. Bell has shown, fecundity and long life go together.