"The foreman of the jury, however," said Whipple, "was a hard-hearted, practical man, a model of business intellect and integrity, but with an incapacity of understanding any intellect or conscience radically differing from his own. Mr. Choate"s argument, as far as the facts and the law were concerned, was through in an hour. Still he went on speaking. Hour after hour pa.s.sed, and yet he continued to speak with constantly increasing eloquence, repeating and recapitulating, without any seeming reason, facts which he had already stated and arguments which he had already urged. The truth was, as I gradually learned, that he was engaged in a hand-to-hand--or rather in a brain-to-brain and a heart-to-heart--contest with the foreman, whose resistance he was determined to break down, but who confronted him for three hours with defiance observable in every rigid line of his honest countenance. "You fool!" was the burden of the advocate"s ingenious argument. "You rascal!" was the phrase legibly printed on the foreman"s incredulous face. But at last the features of the foreman began to relax, and at the end the stern lines melted into acquiescence with the opinion of the advocate, who had been storming at the defences of his mind, his heart, and his conscience for five hours, and had now entered as victor. The verdict was "Not guilty.""
"He who would do some great thing in this short life must apply himself to the work with such a concentration of his forces as, to idle spectators, who live only to amuse themselves, looks like insanity."
It is generally thought that when a man is said to be dissipated in his habits he must be a drinking man, or a gambler, or licentious, or all three; but dissipation is of two kinds, coa.r.s.e and refined. A man can dissipate or scatter all of his mental energies and physical power by indulging in too many respectable diversions, as easily as in habits of a viler nature. Property and its cares make some men dissipated; too many friends make others. The exactions of "society," the b.a.l.l.s, parties, receptions, and various entertainments constantly being given and attended by the _beau monde_, const.i.tute a most wasting species of dissipation. Others, again, fritter away all their time and strength in political agitations, or in controversies and gossip; others in idling with music or some other one of the fine arts; others in feasting or fasting, as their dispositions and feelings incline. But the man of concentration of purpose is never a dissipated man in any sense, good or bad. He has no time to devote to useless trifling of any kind, but puts in as many strokes of faithful work as possible toward the attainment of some definite good.
CHAPTER XI.
AT ONCE.
Note the sublime precision that leads the earth over a circuit of 500,000,000 miles back to the solstice at the appointed moment without the loss of one second--no, not the millionth part of a second--for ages and ages of which it traveled that imperial road.
--EDWARD EVERETT.
Despatch is the soul of business.
--CHESTERFIELD.
Unfaithfulness in the keeping of an appointment is an act of clear dishonesty. You may as well borrow a person"s money as his time.
--HORACE MANN.
By the street of by-and-by one arrives at the house of never.
--CERVANTES.
The greatest thief this world has ever produced is procrastination, and he is still at large.
--H. W. SHAW.
"Oh, how I do appreciate a boy who is always on time!" says H. C. Bowen.
"How quickly you learn to depend on him, and how soon you find yourself intrusting him with weightier matters! The boy who has acquired a reputation for punctuality has made the first contribution to the capital that in after years makes his success a certainty!"
"Nothing commends a young man so much to his employers," says John Stuart Blackie, "as accuracy and punctuality in the conduct of his business. And no wonder. On each man"s exact.i.tude depends the comfortable and easy going of his machine. If the clock goes fitfully n.o.body knows the time of day; and, if your task is a link in the chain of another man"s work, you are his clock, and he ought to be able to rely on you."
"The whole period of youth," said Ruskin, "is one essentially of formation, edification, instruction. There is not an hour of it but is trembling with destinies--not a moment of which, once pa.s.sed, the appointed work can ever be done again, or the neglected blow struck on the cold iron."
"To-morrow, didst thou say?" asked Cotton. "Go to--I will not hear of it. To-morrow! "t is a sharper who stakes his penury against thy plenty--who takes thy ready cash and pays thee naught but wishes, hopes and promises, the currency of idiots. _To-morrow!_ it is a period nowhere to be found in all the h.o.a.ry registers of time, unless perchance in the fool"s calendar. Wisdom disclaims the word, nor holds society with those that own it. "Tis fancy"s child, and folly is its father; wrought of such stuffs as dreams are; and baseless as the fantastic visions of the evening." Oh, how many a wreck on the road to success could say: "I have spent all my life in the pursuit of to-morrow, being a.s.sured that to-morrow has some vast benefit or other in store for me."
"I give it as my deliberate and solemn conviction," said Dr. Fitch, "that the individual who is tardy in meeting an appointment will never be respected or successful in life."
"If a man has no regard for the time of other men," said Horace Greeley, "why should he have for their money? What is the difference between taking a man"s hour and taking his five dollars? There are many men to whom each hour of the business day is worth more than five dollars."
A man who keeps his time will keep his word; in truth, he cannot keep his word unless he _does_ keep his time.
When the d.u.c.h.ess of Sutherland came late, keeping the court waiting, the queen, who was always vexed by tardiness, presented her with her own watch, saying, "I am afraid your"s does not keep good time."
"Then you must get a new watch, or I another secretary," replied Washington, when his secretary excused the lateness of his attendance by saying that his watch was too slow.
"I have generally found that a man who is good at an excuse is good for nothing else," said Franklin to a servant who was always late, but always ready with an excuse.
One of the best things about school and college life is that the bell which strikes the hour for rising, for recitations, or for lectures, teaches habits of promptness. Every young man should have a watch which is a good timekeeper; one that is _nearly_ right encourages bad habits, and is an expensive investment at any price. Wear threadbare clothes if you must, but never carry an inaccurate watch.
"Five minutes behind time" has ruined many a man and many a firm.
"He who rises late," says Fuller, "must trot all day, and shall scarcely overtake his business at night."
Some people are too late for everything but ruin; when a n.o.bleman apologized to George III. for being late, and said, "better late than never," the king replied, "No, I say, _better never than late_."
"Better late than never" is not half so good a maxim as "Better never late."
If Samuel Budgett was even a minute late at an appointment he would apologize; he was as punctual as a chronometer. Punctuality is contagious. Napoleon infused promptness into his officers every minute.
What power there is in promptness to take the drudgery out of a disagreeable task.
"A singular mischance has happened to some of our friends," said Hamilton. "At the instant when He ushered them into existence, G.o.d gave them work to do, and He also gave them a competency of time; so much that if they began at the right moment and wrought with sufficient vigor, their time and their work would end together. But a good many years ago a strange misfortune befell them. A fragment of their allotted time was lost. They cannot tell what became of it, but sure enough, it has dropped out of existence; for just like two measuring lines laid alongside the one an inch shorter than the other, their work and their time run parallel, but the work is always ten minutes in advance of the time. They are not irregular. They are never too soon. Their letters are posted the very minute after the mail is closed. They arrive at the wharf just in time to see the steamboat off, they come in sight of the terminus precisely as the station gates are closing. They do not break any engagement nor neglect any duty; but they systematically go about it too late, and usually too late by about the same fatal interval."
Of Tours, the wealthy New Orleans ship-owner, it is said that he was as methodical and regular as a clock, and that his neighbors were in the habit of judging of the time of the day by his movements.
"How," asked a man of Sir Walter Raleigh, "do you accomplish so much and in so short a time?" "When I have anything do, I go and do it," was the reply. The man who always acts promptly, even if he makes occasional mistakes, will succeed when a procrastinator will fail--even if he have the better judgment.
When asked how he got through so much work, Lord Chesterfield replied: "Because I never put off till morrow what I can do to-day."
Dewitt, pensionary of Holland, answered the same question: "Nothing is more easy; never do but one thing at a time, and never put off until to-morrow what can be done to-day."
Walter Scott was a very punctual man. This was the secret of his enormous achievements. He made it a rule to answer all letters the day they were received. He rose at five. By breakfast time he had broken the neck of the day"s work, as he used to say. Writing to a youth who had obtained a situation and asked him for advice, he gave this counsel: "Beware of stumbling over a propensity which easily besets you from not having your time fully employed--I mean what the women call dawdling. Do instantly whatever is to be done, and take the hours of recreation after business, never before it."
Frederick the Great had a maxim: "Time is the only treasure of which it is proper to be avaricious."
Leibnitz declared that "the loss of an hour is the loss of a part of life."
Napoleon, who knew the value of time, remarked that it was the quarter hours that won battles. The value of minutes has been often recognized, and any person watching a railway clerk handing out tickets and change during the last few minutes available must have been struck with how much could be done in these short periods of time.
At the appointed hour the train starts and by and by is carrying pa.s.sengers at the rate of sixty miles an hour. In a second you are carried twenty-nine yards. In one twenty-ninth of a second you pa.s.s over one yard. Now, one yard is quite an appreciable distance, but one twenty-ninth of a second is a period which cannot be appreciated.
The father of the Webster brothers, before going away to be gone for a week, gave his boys a stint to cut a field of corn, telling them that after it was done, if they had any time left, they might do what they pleased. The boys looked the field over on Monday morning and concluded they could do all the work in three days, so they decided to play the first three days. Thursday morning they went to the field, but it looked so much larger than it did on Monday morning, that they decided they could not possibly do it in three days, and rather than not do it all, they would not touch it. When the angry father returned, he called Ezekiel to him and asked him why they had not harvested the corn. "What have you been doing?" said the stern father. "Nothing, father." "And what have you been doing, Daniel?" "Helping Zeke, sir."
How many boys, and men, too, waste hours and days "helping Zeke!"
"Remember the world was created in six days," said Napoleon to one of his officers. "Ask for whatever you please except time."
Railroads and steamboats have been wonderful educators in promptness. No matter who is late they leave right on the minute.
It is interesting to watch people at a great railroad station, running, hurrying, trying to make up time, for they well know when the time arrives the train will leave.
Factories, shops, stores, banks, everything opens and closes on the minute. The higher the state of civilization the prompter is everything done. In countries without railroads, as in Eastern countries, everything is behind time. Everybody is indolent and lazy.
The world knows that the prompt man"s bills and notes will be paid on the day they are due, and will trust him. People will give him credit, for they know they can depend upon him. But lack of promptness will shake confidence almost as quickly as downright dishonesty. The man who has a habit of dawdling or listlessness will show it in everything he does. He is late at meals, late at work, dawdles on the street, loses his train, misses his appointments, and dawdles at his store until the banks are closed. Everybody he meets suffers more or less from his malady, for dawdling becomes practically a disease.
"You will never find time for anything," said Charles Buxton; "if you want time you must make it."