As middle age passes on into old age, however, one earns a certain right of relaxation. If there is no right to let go the sympathy for the virtues of youth and the conservation of its spirit, there comes the right to give over some of the aggressive activity. To youth belongs the practical action. At no other age is there the same impulse and daring. The virtue of later middle age is to encourage and support, rather than actively engage. It is true we have never learned this lesson. We still surrender to semi-old men the authority to govern us, think for us, act for us. We endow them with spiritual as well as practical leadership, and allow them to strip youth of its opportunities and powers. We permit them to rule not only their own but all the generations. If we could be sure that their rule meant progress, we could trust them to guide us. But, in these times at least, it seems to mean nothing so much as a last fight for a discredited undemocratic philosophy that modern youth are completely through with. From this point of view one of the virtues of this middle season of life will be the imaginative understanding of youth’s purposes and radical ideals. At that age, one no longer needs the same courage to face the battles of life; they are already most of them irrevocably won or lost. There is not the same claim of temperance; the passions and ambitions are relaxed. The sense of justice and democracy will have become a habit or else they will have been forever lost. Only the need of wisdom remains,--that unworldly wisdom which mellowing years can bring, which sees through the disturbance and failure of life the truth and efficacy of youth’s ideal vision. Old age is such a triumph that it may almost be justly relieved of any burden of virtues or duties; it is so unique and beautiful that the old should be given the perfect freedom of the moral city. So splendid a victory is old age over the malign forces of disease and weakness and death that one is tempted to say that its virtue lies simply in being old. Those virtues of youth which grew out of the crises and temptations, physical and spiritual, of early life, are no longer relevant. There may come instead the quieter virtues of contentment and renunciation. Old people have few crises and few temptations; they live in the past and not in the future, as youth does. They cannot be required, therefore, to have that scorn for tradition which is the virtue of youth. They can keep alive for us the tradition that _is_ vital, and from them we can learn many things.