Looking Backward: 2000-1887

by Edward Bellamy

  CHAPTER XVIII.

  That evening I sat up for some time after the ladies had retired,talking with Dr. Leete about the effect of the plan of exempting menfrom further service to the nation after the age of forty-five, apoint brought up by his account of the part taken by the retiredcitizens in the government.

  "At forty-five," said I, "a man still has ten years of good manuallabor in him, and twice ten years of good intellectual service. To besuperannuated at that age and laid on the shelf must be regardedrather as a hardship than a favor by men of energetic dispositions."

  "My dear Mr. West," exclaimed Dr. Leete, beaming upon me, "you cannothave any idea of the piquancy your nineteenth century ideas have forus of this day, the rare quaintness of their effect. Know, O child ofanother race and yet the same, that the labor we have to render as ourpart in securing for the nation the means of a comfortable physicalexistence is by no means regarded as the most important, the mostinteresting, or the most dignified employment of our powers. We lookupon it as a necessary duty to be discharged before we can fullydevote ourselves to the higher exercise of our faculties, theintellectual and spiritual enjoyments and pursuits which alone meanlife. Everything possible is indeed done by the just distribution ofburdens, and by all manner of special attractions and incentives torelieve our labor of irksomeness, and, except in a comparative sense,it is not usually irksome, and is often inspiring. But it is not ourlabor, but the higher and larger activities which the performance ofour task will leave us free to enter upon, that are considered themain business of existence.

  "Of course not all, nor the majority, have those scientific, artistic,literary, or scholarly interests which make leisure the one thingvaluable to their possessors. Many look upon the last half of lifechiefly as a period for enjoyment of other sorts; for travel, forsocial relaxation in the company of their lifetime friends; a timefor the cultivation of all manner of personal idiosyncrasies andspecial tastes, and the pursuit of every imaginable form ofrecreation; in a word, a time for the leisurely and unperturbedappreciation of the good things of the world which they have helped tocreate. But whatever the differences between our individual tastes asto the use we shall put our leisure to, we all agree in lookingforward to the date of our discharge as the time when we shall firstenter upon the full enjoyment of our birthright, the period when weshall first really attain our majority and become enfranchised fromdiscipline and control, with the fee of our lives vested inourselves. As eager boys in your day anticipated twenty-one, so mennowadays look forward to forty-five. At twenty-one we become men, butat forty-five we renew youth. Middle age and what you would havecalled old age are considered, rather than youth, the enviable time oflife. Thanks to the better conditions of existence nowadays, and aboveall the freedom of every one from care, old age approaches many yearslater and has an aspect far more benign than in past times. Persons ofaverage constitution usually live to eighty-five or ninety, and atforty-five we are physically and mentally younger, I fancy, than youwere at thirty-five. It is a strange reflection that at forty-five,when we are just entering upon the most enjoyable period of life, youalready began to think of growing old and to look backward. With youit was the forenoon, with us it is the afternoon, which is thebrighter half of life."

  After this I remember that our talk branched into the subject ofpopular sports and recreations at the present time as compared withthose of the nineteenth century.

  "In one respect," said Dr. Leete, "there is a marked difference. Theprofessional sportsmen, which were such a curious feature of your day,we have nothing answering to, nor are the prizes for which ourathletes contend money prizes, as with you. Our contests are alwaysfor glory only. The generous rivalry existing between the variousguilds, and the loyalty of each worker to his own, afford a constantstimulation to all sorts of games and matches by sea and land, inwhich the young men take scarcely more interest than the honoraryguildsmen who have served their time. The guild yacht races offMarblehead take place next week, and you will be able to judge foryourself of the popular enthusiasm which such events nowadays call outas compared with your day. The demand for '_panem et circenses_'preferred by the Roman populace is recognized nowadays as a whollyreasonable one. If bread is the first necessity of life, recreation isa close second, and the nation caters for both. Americans of thenineteenth century were as unfortunate in lacking an adequateprovision for the one sort of need as for the other. Even if thepeople of that period had enjoyed larger leisure they would, I fancy,have often been at a loss how to pass it agreeably. We are never inthat predicament."