The value of their experience to us is not that it teaches us to avoid their mistakes, for we must try all things for ourselves. The older generation, it is true, often flatters itself that its mistakes somehow make for our benefit, because we learn from their errors to avoid the pitfalls into which they came. But there is no making mistakes by the proxy of a former generation. The world has moved on in the mean time; the pitfalls are new, and we shall only entangle ourselves the more by adopting the methods of our ancestors in getting out of the difficulties. But the value of an old man’s experience is that he has preserved in it the living tradition and hands down to us old honesties, old sincerities, and old graces, that have been crushed in the rough-and-tumble of modern life. It is not tradition in itself that is dangerous, but only dead tradition that has no meaning for the present and is a mere weight on our progress. Such is the legal and economic tradition given to us by our raucous, middle-aged leaders of opinion, adopted by them through motives of present gain, and not through sincere love of the past. But old men, looking back over the times in which they have lived, throw a poetic glamour over the past and make it live again. They see it idealized, but it is the _real_ that they see idealized. An old man of personality and charm has the faculty of cutting away from the past the dead wood, and preserving for us the living tissue which we can graft profitably on our own growing present. Old men have much of the disinterestedness of youth; they have no ulterior motive in giving us the philosophy of their past. The wisest of them instinctively select what is vital for our present nourishment. It is not old men that youth has to fear, but the semi-old, who have lost touch with their youth, and have not lived long enough to get the disinterested vision of their idealized past. But old men who have lived this life of radical virtue are the best of teachers; they distill the perfume of the past, and bring it to us to sweeten our present. Such men grow old only in body. The radical spirit of youth has the power of abolishing considerations of age; the body changes, but the spirit remains the same. In this sense, it is the virtue of old age not to become old.