CHAPTER XI
Dislike of the elderly to change--Some legitimate grounds of
complaint--Modern pronunciation of Latin--How a European crisis was
averted by the old-fashioned method--Lord Dufferin's Latin
speech--Schoolboy costume of a hundred years ago--Discomforts of
travel in my youth--A crack liner of the "eighties"--Old travelling
carriages--An election incident--Headlong rush of extraordinary
turnout--The politically minded signalman and the doubtful
voter--"Decent bodies"--Confidence in the future--Conclusion.
To point out that elderly people dislike change is to assert the most
obvious of truisms. Their three-score years of experience have taught
them that all changes are not necessarily changes for the better, as
youth fondly imagines; and that experiments are not invariably
successful. They have also learnt that no amount of talk will alter
hard facts, and that the law that effect will follow cause is an
inflexible one which torrents of fluent platitudes will neither affect
nor modify. Even should this entail their being labelled with the
silly and meaningless term of "reactionary," I do not imagine that
their equanimity is much upset by it. It is, perhaps, natural for the
elderly to make disparaging comparisons between the golden past and
the neutral-tinted present; so that one shudders at reflecting what a
terrific nuisance Methuselah must have become in his old age.
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