Much could be gained and much could be learnt, by extending the theory of the existing National Trust for this new and much wider purpose.
In the grandiose phrases of Edmund Burke, the National Trust represents 'a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are to be born.' It is a partnership requiring from everyone a vigilance even more constant than John Stuart Mill required for the retention of our liberty:
Never to use too much water, too much heat, too many materials; never to pollute anything anywhere; never to discard anything which will not disappear instantly and of itself; never to join in any activity which will tend to depopulate the earth of any of its species, defoliate the landscape, upset the global atmosphere, desolate our habitat and so the habitat of all our successors.
It is for members of the Third Age, seeing themselves as the nominated trustees of those who are to come, to prompt, inform, and support the administrators, curators, keepers and librarians.
Every sensitive, informed, conscientious member of the Third Age should do everything possible to be aware and informed of the needs of posterity, of the rights of posterity, of things which posterity would most wish to inherit from us and of the things which menace those rights, of the habits and outlooks which have to be transformed if posterity is to be given its due.
It has been the aristocracies which until recently have had the means, the leisure, the cultivation and the taste to act as trustees of the cultural and national societies and for such entities as the society of Europe at large. You only have to contemplate the elderly eighteenth century aristocrat who supervises the planting of a great avenue before his splendid house, knowing that he himself would never live to see the trees grow as tall as his own shrunken height, to recognise that these past patrons of the arts must have been conscious that they were representing the future.
It is the leisured members of the Third Age who should recognise that it is for them to take over where the dukes, the earls, baronets and plain esquires have had to relinquish their responsibilities.
Peter Laslett, Director, Ageing Unit, Cambridge History of Population and Social Structure, Trinity College, Cambridge.