Again, as the young and middle-aged most often show the energy that impels to migrations, it is often inferred that newly settled lands contain the lowest percentages of old people. This, however, seems to be true only for a very limited period and indeed the reverse may soon come to be the case, for the very vigor that impels the emigrant is a trait of those who will also live long; whence it often comes that after a few decades new territories have relatively more aged people than are found in older communities from which the more viable have emigrated and the less viable been eliminated by death. This is, on the whole, fortunate, because the wisdom that only years bring acts like a balance wheel to regulate the impulsions of youth, which always need to be more or less controlled. Thus, in our Western communities we often observe, along with the most advanced ultra-modern steps in material progress and the newest political devices, a certain conservatism in social mores, creeds, etc., which show not only a stagnation but a regression of culture that is typical of progressive senescence and its psychic retardation. We do little to fit for old age and so come to it unprepared and uninformed. The senses fail, but usually so gradually that we rarely realize the full extent of our loss; at any rate, we have time to become adjusted and perhaps reconciled to it. The muscles very gradually atrophy, so that all efferent energy declines and we can do ever less. Indeed, in a new and quite scientific fashion we can speak of old age as the “great fatigue,” for Hodge, Dolley, and Richardson and Orr have shown that the changes in brain cells are almost identical in both. Loss of memory for recent events disorients the old from their environment. They forget names and their vocabulary contracts as the brain shrinks. The mental pace slows down. Their feelings and emotions are less intense, while control over them is often diminished. The friends of their youth are dead; their authority is gone; they are not consulted where once they had everything to say. And so they come at last by slow degrees to realize that they belong to a generation that is passed and the little world about them of which they were once so vital a part is neglecting if not actually crowding them aside. If they come to see that things go on very well without them, both they and their environment are fortunate; but alas! for both if they gravitate toward the conviction that as they withdraw all goes wrong.