7

THE WAY IT HAS TO BE: Every age contains its quota of horrors, exploitations, superstitions, taboos, stupidities, illusions, crimes, diseases, accidents, mistakes, etc., and the modern age is clearly no exception. Assuming the human kind are not eradicated in any future world war, it is quite conceivable that the more intelligent members of generations to come may look back in dread, amazement, and even bewilderment at many of the circumstances which a majority of people take for granted today, just as, in focusing their critical attention upon a number of the (to them) most unacceptable aspects of the Victorian Age, people today often tend to disapprove of child labour, slave labour, the imprisonment of children, compulsory naval and military service, birching, hanging, and the extreme levels of social deprivation which existed among the very poor in relation to education, housing, sanitation, health, diet, employment, and earnings.

But the more fortunate members of a future generation - one existing, say, about a hundred years from now - may well have sound reason to be shocked, surprised, bewildered, or even amused by knowledge of the fact that a majority of late-twentieth-century people lived quite complacently in an age of widespread pollution, excessive noise, traffic congestion, overcrowding, cigarette smoking, drug addiction, alcoholism, cancer, the five-day week, metropolitan loneliness, tinned food, bottled milk, capitalist/socialist antagonism, the threat of nuclear war, religious anachronisms, life-imprisonment, impersonal bureaucracy, dogs' mess on pavements, regular strikes, widespread unemployment, redundancies, football hooliganism, and spiritual deprivation.

However, whether we like it or not, that is the way it has to be. For the virtues of one age are almost invariably the vices of another, the vices of one age the virtues of another, and no age is totally perfect.