better than a petty success. I am
all for the petty success. A glorious failure leads to nothing; a
petty success may lead to a success that is not petty.

So let us begin to examine the budget of the day's time. You say your
day is already full to overflowing. How? You actually spend in
earning your livelihood--how much? Seven hours, on the average? And in
actual sleep, seven? I will add two hours, and be generous. And I will
defy you to account to me on the spur of the moment for the other eight
hours.

IV

THE CAUSE OF THE TROUBLES

In order to come to grips at once with the question of time-expenditure
in all its actuality, I must choose an individual case for examination.
I can only deal with one case, and that case cannot be the average
case, because there is no such case as the average case, just as there
is no such man as the average man. Every man and every man's case is
special.

But if I take the case of a Londoner who works in an office, whose
office hours are from ten to six, and who spends fifty minutes morning
and night in travelling between his house door and his office door, I
shall have got as near to the average as facts permit. There are men
who have to work longer for a living, but there are others who do not
have to work so long.

Fortunately the financial side of existence does not interest us here;
for our present purpose the clerk at a pound a week is exactly as well
off as the millionaire in Carlton House-terrace.

Now the great and profound mistake which my typical man makes in regard
to his day is a mistake of general attitude, a mistake which vitiates
and weakens two-thirds of his energies and interests. In the majority
of instances he does not precisely feel a passion for his business; at
best he does not dislike it. He begins his business functions with
reluctance, as late as he can, and he ends them with joy, as early as
he can. And his engines while he is engaged in his business are seldom
at their full "h.p." (I know that I shall be accused by angry readers
of traducing the city worker; but I am pretty thoroughly acquainted
with the City, and I stick to what I say.)

Yet in spite of all this he persists in looking upon those hours from
ten to six as "the day," to which the ten hours preceding them and the
six hours following them are nothing but a prologue and epilogue. Such
an attitude, unconscious though it be, of course kills his interest in
the odd sixtee