Page:Meta Stern Lilienthal - Women of the Future - 1916.pdf/16

 people, children mature more rapidly than among highly developed races. In simple societies education is a much shorter process than in complex and highly organized societies. A society that will assume the responsibility for the physical, mental and moral education of its young people, and will train them for work as well as for general knowledge and culture, will find it necessary to extend the period of education still further. Not until they are matured in body and mind will the young men and maidens of the future go forth to perform the world's work together, just as they studied and played together.

In a society, founded upon the socially productive labor of all its adult, able-bodied men and women. there will be no room for child labor. Neither will there be room for the labor of the aged, unless it be labor that they love, and from which they accordingly refuse to be separated. There are old men and women to-day who have congenial work they would not abandon. But the hopeless drudgery to which millions of old workingmen and women are subjected because they must keep on working in order to keep on living, is a disgrace even to the present civilization. In the humane, truly civilized state of the future every old man and woman will be as economically secure and free from care without the necessity of working as every child. As modern states provide for their veteran soldiers, so the future state will provide for its veteran workers. Elie Metchnikoff, the eminent Russian scientist, has suggested that in the future old people may be entrusted with important public offices, requiring experience and ripe judgment. It is very likely that Socialistic society will carry out this suggestion. According to Frederick Engels, pioneer Socialist and co-worker of Karl Marx, the Socialist state will mean, "not a government of people, but an administration of things." In such a state there will be many offices requiring the services of men and women over sixty, released from the necessity of productive labor, but still vigorous in body and clear in mind.