Still, the plan has more to recommend it than most others for removing poverty and equalizing conditions.  We should all start rich, and the dying off of those who would never attain youth would amply provide fortunes for those born old.  Crime would be less also; for while there would, doubtless, be some old sinners, the criminal class, which is very largely under thirty, would be much smaller than it is now.  Juvenile depravity would proportionally disappear, as not more people would reach non-age than now reach over-age.  And the great advantage of the scheme, one that would indeed transform the world, is that women would always be growing younger.

THE “OLD SOLDIER”

The “old soldier” is beginning to outline himself upon the public mind as a distant character in American life.  Literature has not yet got hold of him, and perhaps his evolution is not far enough advanced to make him as serviceable as the soldier of the Republic and the Empire, the relic of the Old Guard, was to Hugo and Balzac, the trooper of Italy and Egypt, the maimed hero of Borodino and Waterloo, who expected again the coming of the Little Corporal.  It takes time to develop a character, and to throw the glamour of romance over what may be essentially commonplace.  A quarter of a century has not sufficed to separate the great body of the surviving volunteers in the war for the Union from the body of American citizens, notwithstanding the organization of the Grand Army of the Republic, the encampments, the annual reunions, and the distinction of pensions, and the segregation in Soldiers’ Homes.  The “old soldier” slowly eliminates himself from the mass, and begins to take, and to make us take, a romantic view of his career.  There was one event in his life, and his personality in it looms larger and larger as he recedes from it.  The heroic sacrifice of it does not diminish, as it should not, in our estimation, and he helps us to keep glowing a lively sense of it.  The past centres about him and his great achievement, and the whole of life is seen in the light of it.  In his retreat in the Home, and in his wandering from one Home to another, he ruminates on it, he talks of it; he separates himself from the rest of mankind by a broad distinction, and his point of view of life becomes as original as it is interesting.  In the Homes the battered veterans speak mainly of one thing; and in the monotony of their spent lives develop whimseys and rights and wrongs, patriotic ardors and criticisms on their singular fate, which are original in their character in our society.  It is in human nature to like rest but not restriction, bounty but not charity, and the tired heroes of the war grow restless, though every physical want is supplied.  They have a fancy that they would like to see again the homes of their youth, the farmhouse in the hills, the cottage in the river valley, the lonesome house on the wide prairie, the street that ran down to the