Personal distinction also seems to go with the assumption of adulthood soon after puberty. Whether this is attained through some special attitude or general ability enchannelled by custom, opportunity, or accident in a particular vocation, makes little difference. Poets, painters, mathematicians, scientists, engineers, traders of distinction, assume the professional attitude and the responsibility of adulthood at an early age. Shelley, Keats, Bryant, Peter Cooper, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, George Eliot, Thomas Edison, Maxwell, Galileo, and countless others of the great, all began young. Nelson went to sea at twelve and commanded a ship at fifteen. His contemporary captains in the American merchant marine were boys of eighteen and nineteen. Much of the work of the world continues to be done by men and women under twenty-five. Prizefighters are old at thirty. It is a favorite doctrine of representative American employers, such as Henry Ford, that workingmen over forty are antiquated, and to be scrapped. Did not the great Osler advise euthanasia for all men over sixty? Nevertheless, the ruling personages in the ruling classes—the captains of industry, the masters of finance, the public officials, the judges, the generals—are progressively older and older now. They are men whose minds had matured and set while their bodies were young, and whose policies derive from the unconscious premise that what was modern and advanced in their youth is necessarily so in their old age. They are the elder statesmen who in their prolonged infancy rule the world.…