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ESSAYS IN PERSUASION

PART

both hands the plastic material of social life intoour own contemporary image.

We do not merely belong to a latter-day age—we are ourselves in the literal sense olderthan our ancestors were in the years of ourmaturity and our power. Mr. Wells bringsout strongly a too-much neglected feature ofmodern life, that we live much longer thanformerly, and, what is more important, prolongour health and vigour into a period of life whichwas formerly one of decay, so that the averageman can now look forward to a duration ofactivity which hitherto only the exceptionalcould anticipate. I can add, indeed, a fur-ther fact which Mr. Wells overlooks (I think),likely to emphasise this yet further in the nextfifty years as compared with the last fifty years;—namely, that the average age of a rapidlyincreasing population is much less than that ofa stationary population. For example, in thestable conditions to which we may hope toapproximate in the course of the next twogenerations, we shall somewhat rapidly ap-proach to a position in which, in proportion topopulation, elderly people (say, sixty-five yearsof age and above) will be nearly ioo per cent,and middle-aged people (say, forty-five years ofage and above), nearly 50 per cent morenumerous than in the recent past. In thenineteenth century effective power was in thehands of men probably not less than fifteenyears older on the average than in the sixteenthcentury; and before the twentieth century is