I have commented elsewhere on the natural astonishment of the first parents who realized, with their inefficient prehistoric minds, that _this_ baby belonged to _them_, and how, in the considered opinion of able scientists, the little hitherto missing link joined father and mother into the first human family. Tending and providing for Baby made the cave a home; but I suspect it was a long time before tending and providing for Grandpa added another motive for the cultivation of those higher qualities that distinguish man from all other animals. Why, there were savages who ate him! Yet in due time the olde, olde, very olde man became such a motive, and to-day man is the only animal that takes care of its grandfather. When you think of the differences between men to-day and men then, between men then and the ape-men before them, and between men now as they go about their various occupations, it seems quite possible that ape-men had no souls at all, and that some men to-day have rudimentary ones, millions of years behind others in evolution. It explains much. And so, wherever there is an olde, olde, very olde man, I dare say the care his youngers take of him is doing them good; they might even reverse the parental platitude of punishment, and say, "Grandpa, this does me more good than it does you."
But this proud possession of an olde, olde, very olde man does not always work visibly toward such beneficent ends. His obstreperous infancy, masquerading in mature garments, sometimes exhausts the patience of his youngers; and his permanent conviction (often the only sign of intelligence left) that he knows more than they do, and perhaps more than anybody else, makes their task difficult: it is one thing, so to speak, to take care of a baby when it is growing up, and another thing to take care of a baby when it is growing down. Then, indeed, one needs the assurance of immortality, the conviction that Grandpa is, little as one might think it, still growing up, and that this simulacrum of Grandpa that still remains to be looked after, must not be taken too seriously. These olde, olde, very olde men are not all just alike: there are grandpas whom anybody might be proud to take care of, and grandpas whom anybody might be excused for wishing (as the brisk, modern phrase has it) to sidestep. And the explanation of this diversity, as of much else that puzzles us in a puzzling world, may be that they were not all just alike when they were babies. Inside their thin and tiny skulls some had better brains than others, brains with more of those wonderful little pyramidal neurones, which, able scientists (unless I get their message twisted) tell me, correlate, connect, assemble, and unite our individual ideas, memories, sensations, and intellectual and emotional what-nots. Men, in short, may be born free, but they are not born equal.