and yet the same, that the labor we have to render as our
part in securing for the nation the means of a comfortable physical
existence is by no means regarded as the most important, the most
interesting, or the most dignified employment of our powers. We look
upon it as a necessary duty to be discharged before we can fully
devote ourselves to the higher exercise of our faculties, the
intellectual and spiritual enjoyments and pursuits which alone mean
life. Everything possible is indeed done by the just distribution of
burdens, and by all manner of special attractions and incentives to
relieve our labor of irksomeness, and, except in a comparative sense,
it is not usually irksome, and is often inspiring. But it is not our
labor, but the higher and larger activities which the performance of
our task will leave us free to enter upon, that are considered the
main business of existence.

"Of course not all, nor the majority, have those scientific, artistic,
literary, or scholarly interests which make leisure the one thing
valuable to their possessors. Many look upon the last half of life
chiefly as a period for enjoyment of other sorts; for travel, for
social relaxation in the company of their lifetime friends; a time
for the cultivation of all manner of personal idiosyncrasies and
special tastes, and the pursuit of every imaginable form of
recreation; in a word, a time for the leisurely and unperturbed
appreciation of the good things of the world which they have helped to
create. But whatever the differences between our individual tastes as
to the use we shall put our leisure to, we all agree in looking
forward to the date of our discharge as the time when we shall first
enter upon the full enjoyment of our birthright, the period when we
shall first really attain our majority and become enfranchised from
discipline and control, with the fee of our lives vested in
ourselves. As eager boys in your day anticipated twenty-one, so men
nowadays look forward to forty-five. At twenty-one we become men, but
at forty-five we renew youth. Middle age and what you would have
called old age are considered, rather than youth, the enviable time of
life. Thanks to the better conditions of existence nowadays, and above
all the freedom of every one from care, old age approaches many years
later and has an aspect far more benign than in past times. Persons of
average constitution usually live to eighty-five or ninety, and at
forty-five we a