Is there nothing ambiguous, Mr. President, in such a compliment ?
To be congratulated on one's senility ! To be congratulated on having
reached that stage of life when the bodily and mental powers pass
into decline and decay ! Lear is made by Shakespeare to say,

" Age is unnecessary ;''

and a later poet. Dr. Johnson, has expressed the same idea in one of
his sonorous lines :

" Superfluous lags the veteran on the stage."

You have not forgotten, Mr. President, the old Greek saying :

" Whom the gods love die young," —



10

nor the passage in Wordswortli :



" Oh, sir, the good die first,

And they whose hearts are dry as summer dust,
Bum to the socket."

Mucli has been said of the wisdom of Old Age. Old Age is
wise, I grant, for itself, but not wise for the community. It is wise
in declining new enterprises, for it has not the power nor the time to
execute them ; wise in shrinking from difficulty, for it has not the
strength to overcome it ; wise in avoiding danger, for it lacks the
faculty of ready and swift action, by which dangers are parried and
converted into advantages. But this is not wisdom for mankind at
lai'ge, by whom new enterprises must be undertaken, dangers met,
and difficulties surmounted. What a world would this be if it were
made up of old men ! — generation succeeding generation of hoary
ancients who had but a dozen years or perhaps half that time to live !
What new work of good would be attempted? what existing abuse
or evil corrected? What strange subjects would such a world afford
for the pencils of our artists — groups of superannuated gray-beards
basking in the sun through the long days of spring, or huddling like
sheep in warm corners in the winter time ; houses with the timbers
dropping apart ; cities in ruins ; roads un wrought and impassable ;
weedy gardens and fields with the surface feebly scratched to put in a
scanty harvest ; decrepit old men clambering into crazy wagons,
perhaps to be run away with, or mounting horses, if they mounted
them at all, in terror of being hurled from their backs like a stone
from a sling. 