THE AGE OF RETIREMENT.
MAN SHOULD BE AS YOUNG AS HIS JOB t
If a man wants to know wlion is the time to resign, there is the plain working rule: "When you are no longer as young as your job, say so,” writes Mr. J. L. Paton, MOA.;;' High Master of Manchester Grammar School, in the “Evening News.” But it all depends on the job. A bishop, a cardinal, must be paternal. Age, grey hairs —or a skull cap to cover the lack of them — and mellow wisdom are part of his qualifications. It is the same with Cabinet Ministers. Sixty is youth for a Premier, The king who listened to his young advisers soon lost ten out of his twelve tribes. But in aviation, for instance, it is the other way. Everything depends on steadiness of nerve and rapidity of action. When the pilot Ints done 10 years he comes to earth and becomes an administrator. The express driver is of no use when lie begins to run his train at half-speed. Your dentist and surgeon charge high fees because advancing years rob them of deftness of wrist and suppleness of- muscle. Sir John Franklin was in ins 60th. year when he Avas sent out by the Admiralty to discover the North-west Passage. Wc know better now, and send out young men to the Arctic.
Th e teacher is midway between cardinal and the air pilot, Arnold had to mount a steep' corkscrew staircase to his Sixth form room. "When 1 can’t go up those stairs at the run,” he said. "I shall cease to teach.” Who feeds fat oven should himself be fat; and, on the same .principle, who teaches the young should himself be young. A successful administrator tells us that! as a young man he sought poise and balance in me society of men older than himself; now that he has passed middle life he turns to young men to find in them what he needs to keep in touch with me spirit of the age. Lord Mbrley did the same, and so does the new .Lord Chancellor. The best recipe for a man who wants to keep young is to fall in love with his job. And for a woman too. Sarah Bernhardt had passed the.alloted span when she said, “For me to act is to live.” The record of the centuries is full of the achievement of old men who kept young. We did not need to go back to Abraham and the longivitios of CefiFkiy : ' Gladstone*' was over 80 when lie passed the first Home Rule Bill through a turbulent House of Commons. He was, in the words of William Jones, the psychologist, "a perpetual self-renovating youth,” Of him, as of Benjamin Jowett and Pope Leo XIII., it may be said that, lik e the sun, they were larger than, ever in their setting. It was not that they husbanded out life’s taper to a close; they were always spending and being spent. There is no use for the old man whose eyes are all in the back of his head, who can do nothing but grumble ati the degeneracy of modern days, and cannot, think of the world in any other terms than those to which he grew accustomed when he was young. “It is the old men with old souls who are useless,” said Lord Byron.
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Shannon News, 9 May 1924, Page 1
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566THE AGE OF RETIREMENT. Shannon News, 9 May 1924, Page 1
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