Morning journal and courier., 1886-01-19

ship of property; and Lord Selborne, who helped him, was far past middle life. They struck away one of F'the foundations of SO ciety" as if they had been 25. Pic Mono was an old man when he asked 8 council to sane
 ton the dogma of papal infallibility, that is when he male, in the judgment of many
 theologians, the greatest practical innovation
 ever made in the machinery of the Roman church, converting it's government from a co-opative oligarchy under Dodge into an irresponsible monarchy. M. Grevy, the Pres ident of the French Republic, though an ex- ceedingly old man, leans always toward the left; and it is not the past which is lamented by thinker like MT. Herbert Spencer, who is certainly not immature. 'I have seen many changes" {" said one of the very oldest members of Parliament the other day. s'and feel happy in this, that our English world is in all respects happier, better, and wiser than when 1 entered it, J and that spirit is ia, from uncommon. The idea may be an error derived from that great source of error in generalizations, individual experience, but We should be inclined to say that the old of our day appreciate change rather more de- cldedly than the young. We would ask ev- cry reader of these lines to look round and see if he did not know some old man-or, still more frequently, old woman-in whom was great tolerance fof new ideas, who praised, instead of depreciated the changes he or she had seen, and who welcomed inno- WILL mOT0 AOpoIuln6SS than younger auditors could quite follow. We could name dozen such people, and have delighted of ten in a renewal of hopefulness derived from the talk of the very old. They protest that
 the world is better till it is impossible, in spite of too many patent facts, not to be
 leve them and acquire from the belief mo mentaIy reinvigoration of mental energy.
 Can the old have changed in an element of character so important as this? It will be
 held strange thing to say, but we think,
 though the ancient idea was always exagger- ated, that the change is positive, and has oc-
 cured in three ways. In the first place, the
 ''wisdom of age" is most of It necessarily
 wisdom derived from experience, and the
 wisdom of man full of the experience of successful change leads him to think change good. Our fathers rather grandfathers- saw little change, except in their own powers of enjoyment, of action, and of hoping, all of which diminished, and they therefore
 thought change bad; but our own old men
 have lived through changes greater tha an the young can recognize or can appreciate, and they have found them good. The new gen tleness, the new security, the new material
 advantages of life are to them inexpressibly
 pleasant; and reasoning, as their ancestors did, from the facts they knew, they pro- nounce change good, aud, instead of dread
 ing, welcome it with tolerance sometimes a
 little sardonic, but always real How is 8
 
 even tremble about suffrages or the destruc- ton of England, or the danger that ''mob'
 will eat him up! His experience is that those things do not happen; and, like all the old it is experience, and not theory, on which ht
 in his heart relies What can boys know of
 the bad things that used to be? They grum-
 ble about railways, but the old man used to sit outside coach for eight hours at a time in March, and knows what it was to want
 fire when matches had not been thought of They grumble because a postman is 10 minutes late, but his experience is of days before Sil
 Rowland Hill, when you waited month fol
 frank in order to write to your married daughter. Experience has cured him oi
 conservatism as it formerly induced conser v&tism, and experience is all in all. Then, too his energy has increased. Whether modern hygiene has increased the happiness
 of life we do not know, though we think il has, if only by shortening the pain of tooth ache; but it most certainly has increased the energy of the old, and therefore decreased root of half their conservatism, feebleness which extended to the mind Except in Q workhouse, we hardly see senility now, the old-and particularly the old ladies-being as brisk as bees, and mentally even inclined to be little giddy. The new thing fright ems them no longer, any more than the new face; and they would try. an electric 1ocomo- tive as calmly carriage, quite confident that if scientific men liked it it would dc them no harm. The mental timorousness of old age has gone; an innovation gives nc shock. Fearless of what is coming, experi enced in all the benefits of change, the old can no longer praise only the past or hold re- sistauoe virtue, and new attitude of mind has been assumed and is maintained for 6 third reason, which we shall, except to men of our own generation, have more difficulty in explaining. We cannot prove the fact, but we know it to be the fact, that habitude we do not mean experience, but habitude had over the old of forty years since a domination which has disappeared. The cid of our day have habits, but are not domina-
 ted by habitudes. They do not protect
 themselves from change by arranging their lives so exactly that every change becomes a terror, and novel act impossible to be cone, Half the old at that time were ''fosslized"- that is were subjected, or subjected them selves, to scheme of life, the deliberate ob- jeet of which was to make to-day, yesterday and tomorrow to-day. Our middle-aged readers mothers, if they have the good for tune to have them, will tell them of men who had played backgammon every night with unwilling partners for twenty years who rose, and ate and slept if they were wound-up clocks; who, like old Prince Kau nitz, called for ten years at the same time on the same people, and who resented an inter ruption to their "ways" as if it had been ar
 outrage, or, at the best, if they were sweet tempered, as ''serious disturbance" No body sees such people now; the very motive which produced them has disappeared; the old lead almost as varied lives as the young and the habitude is change and not monoto- ny. Now habitude, like experience, rules the minds of the old; and when the habi- tudes, like the experiences, suggest that change is usually for the better, and tke mind has energy to seek the better, the an cient relation of the old to the world neces sarily disappears. We do not quite expect to hear the old distrusted because they are sure to go too fast; but we do expect to hear it said, ''At his great age one is always too little afraid of revolution" We have been told by men who should have known that if an officer wants to be shot there is no posi- tion equal to the staff of very old general, for ''somehow they do not mind; and our children may live to see simila, opinion expressed about old politicians, old publicists and even old explorers inta phys ics. The tone of old age has altered, and in
 nothing more than this, that it has ceased tc