How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day

PREFACE TO THIS EDITION

This preface, though placed at the beginning, as a preface must be,
should be read at the end of the book.

I have received a large amount of correspondence concerning this small
work, and many reviews of it--some of them nearly as long as the book
itself--have been printed. But scarcely any of the comment has been
adverse. Some people have objected to a frivolity of tone; but as the
tone is not, in my opinion, at all frivolous, this objection did not
impress me; and had no weightier reproach been put forward I might
almost have been persuaded that the volume was flawless! A more
serious stricture has, however, been offered--not in the press, but by
sundry obviously sincere correspondents--and I must deal with it. A
reference to page 43 will show that I anticipated and feared this
disapprobation. The sentence against which protests have been made is
as follows:--"In the majority of instances he [the typical man] does
not precisely feel a passion for his business; at best he does not
dislike it. He begins his business functions with some 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 am assured, in accents of unmistakable sincerity, that there are many
business men--not merely those in high positions or with fine
prospects, but modest subordinates with no hope of ever being much
better off--who do enjoy their business functions, who do not shirk
them, who do not arrive at the office as late as possible and depart as
early as possible, who, in a word, put the whole of their force into
their day's work and are genuinely fatigued at the end thereof.

I am ready to believe it. I do believe it. I know it. I always knew
it. Both in London and in the provinces it has been my lot to spend
long years in subordinate situations of business; and the fact did not
escape me that a certain proportion of my peers showed what amounted to
an honest passion for their duties, and that while engaged in those
duties they were really _living_ to the fullest extent of which they
were capable. But I remain convinced that these fortunate and happy
individuals (happier perhaps than they guessed) did not and do not
constitute a majority, or anything like a majority. I remain convinced
that the majority of decent average conscientious men of business (men
with aspirations and ideals) do not as a rule go home of a night
genuinely tired. I remain convinced that they put not as much but as
little of themselves as they conscientiously can into the earning of a
livelihood, and that their vocation bores rather than interests them.