While the fact that numerous men and women have performed some of their best work after they have entered their seventies or eighties, shines out in biographical history, there is an increasing disregard for age manifested in various employments and professions. It seems that we are hardly up to some of the Orientals in exhibiting a proper reverence for the wisdom of years and experience.

In discussing the question, "Can We Spare the Old Men?" The Independent of July 2, 1903, said: "The saddest state of affairs is found in the professions, and especially in those which in one way or another have the making of public opinion. Every little while someone asks why there are no great newspapers to-day? Time was when The Tribune, The Sun, The Times, The Evening Post, and The Springfield Republican, helped to make history. Their opinions counted for something. That was when their editorial pages were contributed by men of ripe experience. Greeley, Dana, Raymond, Bryant, Godkin, and 'Sam' Bowles were men of unlike minds and of different characters, but they had one qualification, in common. They had lived. They had stored up experience. They were not kids."

It may be true that some of the veteran readers of the press, whose memories run back to the fifties and sixties, feel the loss of the vigorous personality, the strong characteristics, and the able and pronounced opinions of the distinguished editors, who, having filled their mission, have passed away. But will not The Independent admit that there are many men of matured brain power and ripe experience contributing editorial pages to some of our widely read newspapers of today?

But The Independent goes on to say: "In the universities the state of affairs threatens to become even worse. The modem University President has become infected with the business way of looking at things. He thinks he is run ning 'a plant' like a cotton factory or a barbed wire mill, and must turn out a certain number of intellects of assorted sizes every June. For this work he needs a lot of young hustlers in the professors' chairs, who can do business on the 'step lively' plan of the trolley car conductor. And as to the ministry, it is only necessary to recall the oft-bewailed 'dead-line of fifty years/ beyond which the clergyman's usefulness is supposed to end. Indeed, there would almost seem to be no suitable place in the world's work to-day for the man over sixty unless it be the Supreme Court of the United States.

"The whole situation, we say, is a sad one. It is sad because it reveals an utter failure to discriminate between the pretentious things and the real things in human life. It is sad because the results will be more and more destructive of quality, of manner, of appreciation of the sound and the beautiful, which only long years of hard experience can reproduce.

Young men must do most of the world's hard and active work, but there is a work which they are incompetent to touch. An age which knows the difference between wisdom and knowledge will retain for that work the men who are competent. Wherever manner and quality are still in demand, wherever real goods are still sold, the man of experience is found."

Dr. Theodore L. Cuyler, in his Beula-Land, says: "In this fast age there is a clamorous demand for young men, and sometimes a disposition to shelve those who are past three-score; but there are some men who will not be shelved, or, if they have been, the public necessities take them down again, and demand their ripe judgment and experience. When a difficult case comes into court it is commonly a veteran lawyer that is called on to make the decisive argument; when the young physician is baffled by the novel disease, the old doctor, who has turned down every malady known to mortal flesh, is called into consultation. When the life of Germany was assailed by the legions of France, three old heads were put together - Kaiser Wilhelm, Bismarck, and von Moltke; they soon blew the invasion into fragments. The ancient parish of Franklin, Massachusetts, was once disturbed by novelties that threatened its orthodoxy and its peace; the venerable Dr. Emmons, at the age of ninety, put on his cocked hat, and, marching into the meeting-house, quelled the commotion in fifteen minutes, and scattered the fogs of heresy from the atmosphere."

Whether the world can well spare its old men, depends on what kind of old men they are. There are various grades of men who are old. Some men make themselves old, and lead a humdrum sort of life - aimless and indifferent. They are much like the man whom Ralph Waldo Emerson describes as having lived "to wear out his boots." And there are others whose opportunities and environments are not particularly favorable, yet keeping themselves young in heart and active in mind, are of some account to the communities in which they live. The manner in which men and women grow old is largely a matter of education, of purpose, of will-power. Sometimes an ailment, which the laws of hygiene cannot prevent nor medicine cure, brings on premature old age and makes life burdensome and seemingly profitless; but in a majority of cases "man is man and master of his fate."

General William Booth, who organized the Salvation Army in London in 1865, completed his seventy-fifth year in April, 1904. During the past forty-two years he has accomplished an enormous amount of work in evangelism associated with the Army. An impress of his wonderful personality has been made in many lands. After he attained his seventy-third year he was active in preaching and organizing in America, France, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Scotland, and England. He had just passed his seventy-fifth birthday when he set for a lively campaign against the powers of evil in Scandinavia, Germany, and Switzerland.

He is a grand old gentleman, a faithful bishop of souls! Seventy-five years old, and no church can shelve him! No ecclesiastical body can depose him. He has taken good care of his body. His heart and mind are continually set on things that inspire. These keep him young and vigorous.