to all that is good and vigorous, because your age lies nearer to the years of childlike innocence and of nature. Quite otherwise is this trait in you regarded by the majority of the older world. They accuse you of arrogance, of hasty and presumptuous judgment exceeding your powers, of always thinking yourselves in the right, of a mania for innovation. Yet they only smile good-humouredly at these failings of yours. All this, they think, is founded solely on your lack of knowledge of the world—that is to say, of the general state of human corruption; for they have no eyes for anything else in the world. You have courage now, they think, only because you hope to find helpers of like mind, and do not know the grim and stiff-necked resistance which will be offered to your plans for the better. Just wait a little while, they say; when once the youthful fire of your imagination has died away, when you have come to learn the general state of selfishness, slothfulness, and dislike for work, when you yourselves have once properly tasted the sweetness of going on in an accustomed groove, then the desire and the will to be better and cleverer than all the rest will depart from you. This good hope which they have of you is not based on thin air; they have found it confirmed in their own person. They must confess that in the days of their foolish youth they dreamed of improving the world, just as you do now; nevertheless, as they grew more mature they became as tame and peaceful as you see them at present. I believe them; I have myself, even in my own not very long experience, seen young men, who at first aroused other hopes, none the less at a later stage fully come up to the well-meaning expectations of this age of maturity. Do this no longer, young men; for if you do, how can a better generation ever begin? The glow of youth will, it is true, fall from you, and the flame of your imagina-
