Upon the part played by the old in maintaining morality I do not wish to dwell, since it differs little to-day from what it has always been. A mistake which all societies have made is to entrust the management of their affairs to the old. Old men are naturally more vindictive, bad tempered, malevolent, and narrow-minded than young ones. They are easily provoked to disapproval, and dislike more things than they like. Having for the most part lived their own lives, they have nothing left to do but to interfere in the lives of others. They form the governments, misrepresent the people whom they oppress, preach to the people whom they exploit, and teach the people whom they deceive. They mete out rewards and punishments, sentence criminals to death, direct businesses, make laws which they have no temptation to disobey and wars in which they do not propose to fight. If the country were handed over exclusively to the governance of men under thirty-five, and everybody over that age were forbidden to interfere on pain of being sent to the lethal chamber, it would be a happier and a better place. Unfortunately the young men are too busy trying to make a living in the subordinate positions to which the old men grudgingly admit them to have the time or energy to interfere with other people. Besides, being young, they wish to live, a process for which the regulation of the lives of others is a poor substitute. In the sphere of morality the function of the old is confined to discovering methods of deterring the young from pleasures of which they themselves are no longer capable. Old men give young men good advice, no longer being able to give them bad examples, and old women invent a symbolic Mrs. Grundy to intimidate their daughters into resisting the temptations which now pass them by. The deterrent influences so exercised are called morality under which name they impose on the young who will not have caught their elders lying often enough to disbelieve them, until they have begun to produce sons and daughters of their own, by which time they will be only too ready to abet the prevailing hypocrisy. The other strand in the fabric of modern morality has already been noticed as the tendency of the weaker to get even with the stronger by taking it out of him on moral grounds. Morals, it is thought, are everybody’s privilege and everybody’s possession. Few of us can understand Einstein’s theory of relativity, but we all know the difference between right and wrong. Hence the man who is deficient in talent can make up for it in virtue, and by assuring himself that God’s noblest work is an honest man, put brains and capacity in their proper place.