SIR,—Your contributor Bertrand dc Jouvenel is to be congratulated for
his very splendid article on 'The Future of the Aged.' My generation—that is, the over sixty-fives—have indeed been 'toppled to a position of excessive in- feriority and indignity.' Not only are we the financially and economically poorest sections of modern society but we are also the least respected. The pendulum has swung right over to the other side since the days of my youth in the early 1900s. I quite agree that sixty years ago the elderly were too often intolerant and tyrannical, and exercised far too much power over their children and grand- children, but today we are certainly experiencing the other extreme. Experience must surely count for something in life and is it not an axiom of Christianity, which is shared by most other great religious faiths, that the elderly should be honoured?
I suggest that in a well-ordered society there should still be useful and important functions which perhaps only those of very mature experience can perform. Every age of man can still play its part even in the modern world, the young to execute, the middle-aged group to administer, the elderly to advise. Experience should never be wasted.
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