distance is not always the measure of progress. It is not seldom the effect of rapid changes in mechanical appliances, in material agencies and economic conditions, in literary taste and in ideals of culture; an effect which has unsettled youth in the inherited ways and not yet settled them in well-considered new rules of living. The experience that might aid in easing the process of readjustment is not always at hand and not always used when it is attainable. The experience of age is too often shown in dogmatic rules. The inexperience of youth is too often the accompaniment of a childish conviction that everything that has been is wrong and everything that promises to be is best.

There is, therefore, greater need, perhaps, than ever before for wisdom and patience and sympathetic understanding of those from whom one differs within the family life. It is for the grandparents to set the fashion for these new adjustments. They have loved most because they have given most. They have learned most, or could have learned most, because longer in the school of life. And they have but a little way to travel on the long road their children and their children's children must go to meet their fate.

To the lasting credit of human nature be it said that the grandparents of to-day measure as well for the most part as do the parents in these difficult tasks of family adjustment to a rapidly changing social order. It is often the grandparent who sees what the different life of his or her children have meant to the still greater difference in the condition of the grandchild, and can interpret to the latter the reason for the restraint of the parent. It is often through the tenderness and devotion to the aged called out by the grandparents that the son and daughter learn the real depths of parental love. It is often the partial affection of the grandparent for the grandchild that makes a new tie in family love and enables that family love to grow wiser as well as stronger. It may be, as quoted before, that no house is large enough for two families. It surely is true that no family living room is spacious enough for the continuous use of three generations; but it is still more true that with new interests all around the circle of family membership a more varied family life can be managed without friction or loss of privacy for any member if only there is the right attitude of

mind. To-day the ideal of the Heaven-father fastens itself as easily to the child's affection for grandpa as on his dependence upon his father. To-day the ideal of mother-love, never lessened even by wrong-doing of the child, is as securely fibred upon the picture of grandma, ever ready to heal and comfort, as upon that of the mother, whose daily ministrations make the child comfortable.

The Special Gifts of the Old to the Home and the World.In some ways it is surely more easy to believe in goodness at the heart of things because some aged man or woman, closely related by blood and breeding, has been a living example of what must be revered. Moreover, to the family, as to the world-at-large, old age brings a special gift--if that old age is what it may be. Each period of life has its own gift to make. Age should make a precious contribution, even the central faith of life.

Youth, eager, responsive to all noble ambitions and touched by all noble dissatisfactions with what is, makes its plan for what should be on a strictly logical basis. His rejected Evil is wholly evil; his chosen Good without a flaw. Children are all Calvinists; and youth, for the most part, separates its ideas of good and bad as the sheep and goats within its mind. Well that it is so. The law of growth in life is so far from logical, so operative by inconsistent fluctuations, that it is of the greatest social use for each fresh generation of reformers to hew to the line and express that intolerance of compromise which helps the struggling moral sense to clarify the issues of each new day.

In middle life, if the individual worker for better things is not merely a prophesier but has become an actual agent for the realization of his ideal in practical achievement, he suffers many a disillusion, not in respect to his ideal, but in respect to the ease of working it into the body politic or into the compelling purpose of the social mind. That is the time of danger; and how many lose heart and hope and fall weakly by the way when they first learn that to state a truth with power is not enough to insure its acceptance! That one should set himself with courage and faith to the long, slow processes of actual change of the social order after he has learned how difficult that is, is to be indeed a heroa hero of the actualization of the ideal, even though he dies with the promised land hardly in sight.

In later life comes to many, and should to all, another gift. Not alone the vision of youth, never lost and always dear; not only the strength of open-eyed effort to achieve so much of the ideal, even its very least atom, as the times and the conditions allow and not lose heart that it is so little, but also the interpretative and harmonizing spirit of those who see, beyond the personal ideal and vision and far beyond the personal achievement, the upward march of all mankind-not alone the leaders of that march; not alone those who will and know the upward way, but all who feel the under-current pressure "toward the better, ever onward toward the best." This pressure even those feel who fondly imagine they are holding all life to outgrown patterns, and they prove its power by their unconscious response.

Another gift of insight they may have who grow old in the spirit of youth. It is the gift of seeing in one picture those who have come a long way up the path of progress and those who have but just entered upon it. The harsh judgments of youth, so tonic and useful, that measure moral actions by their exact position in ethical perception (judgment so tonic and useful that youth without that element misses its own gift to human progress) cease to serve in old age for purposes of just discrimination. In later life may come the wisdom of understanding those from whom one differs, the gift of seeing the helpful interrelations of newer and older "mores" in normal human development and the glad recognition that even defective moral vision, though retarding needed changes, may be used by the powers that balance our complex life to hold its course steady in chaos of change. These gifts may add patience and love, sweetness and light, to the zeal of the reformer and yet not dull his ardor for the next morning-hour of progress.

Not the old, then, because it is old, nor the new because it is new; not the few who will hold no parley with that which to them is evil, nor the many who cling to what they have inherited lest they lose life's best treasures; not to those who call aloud in the market place, "Behold the coming of the Lord!" nor to those who sit at the fireside and cherish their own only; not on or to any one manifestation of the life in which we have our being can the old, with the spirit of youth, fibre their faith and trust.

In all the struggling, mistaken, weary, selfish, cowardly, alike as in all the brave, heroic, unselfish and lovely, is manifestation that makes "no good thing a failure, no evil thing success." This is the testimony of a ripe and wise old age. In that they must trust who have tested the real things of life in the real world of effort, nor lost hope in the Onward Way for all.

QUESTIONS ON THE GRANDPARENTS

1. What have been the general tendencies in social treatment of the aged? 2. What are some of the social needs in respect to public and private health, vocational training, wages and standards of living, family and personal insurance and educational opportunities which must be met if old age is to be prolonged as far as possible and made happy and comfortable to the end of life?

3. What should be the aim of youth and middle life in respect to preparation for old age?

4. Read Old Age Support of Women Teachers, by Dr. Lucille Eaves, A Study in Economic Relations of Women, by the Department of Research of the Women's Educational and Industrial Union of Boston, Mass., and read "The Trade Union and the Old Man," by John O'Grady, Catholic University of America, published in American Journal of Sociology of November, 1917. Are the suggestions in these articles along needed lines?

CHAPTER V

BROTHERS, SISTERS, AND NEXT OF KIN

"THE members of the ancient family were united by something more powerful than birth, affection, or physical strength; this was the religion of the sacred fire and of dead ancestors. This caused the ancient family to form a single body, both in this life and in the next."-DE COULANGES, in The Ancient City.

"Land belonged to the clan and the clan was settled upon the land. A man was thus not a member of the clan because he lived upon or even owned the land, but he lived upon the land and had interest in it because he was a member of the clan."-HEARN, in The Aryan Household.

"Three things if possessed by a man make him fit to be a chief of kindred: that he should speak in behalf of his kin and be listened to; that he should fight in behalf of his kin and be feared; that he should be security on behalf of his kin and be accepted."WELSH TRIADS (cited by Seebohm).

"I cannot choose but think upon the time
When our two loves grew like two buds;

School parted us; we never found again

That childish world where our two spirits mingled

Like scents from varying roses that remain one sweetness.
Yet the twin habit of that earlier time

Lingered for long about the heart and tongue.

We had been natives of one happy clime
And its dear accent to our utterance clung.
And were another childhood world my share,
I would be born a little sister there."

-GEORGE ELIOT, in Brother and Sister.