later
than usual in the shop one evening, and make up their minds to take
stock and count the till, and the disillusion lays them low, and they
struggle into the living-room and murmur: "I shall never have that
beautiful furniture, and I shall never have that system of
ventilation. If I had known earlier, I would have at least got a few
inexpensive cushions to go on with, and I would have put my fist
through a pane in the window. But it's too late now. I'm used to
Windsor chairs, and I should feel the draught horribly."

If I were a preacher, and if I hadn't got more than enough to do in
minding my own affairs, and if I could look any one in the face and
deny that I too had pursued for nearly forty years the great British
policy of muddling through and hoping for the best--in short, if
things were not what they are, I would hire the Alhambra Theatre or
Exeter Hall of a Sunday night--preferably the Alhambra, because more
people would come to my entertainment--and I would invite all men and
women over twenty-six. I would supply the seething crowd with what
they desired in the way of bodily refreshment (except spirits--I would
draw the line at poisons), and having got them and myself into a nice
amiable expansive frame of mind, I would thus address them--of course
in ringing eloquence that John Bright might have envied:

Men and women (I would say), companions in the universal pastime
of hiding one's head in the sand,--I am about to impart to you the
very essence of human wisdom. It is not abstract. It is a
principle of daily application, affecting the daily round in its
entirety, from the straphanging on the District Railway in the
morning to the straphanging on the District Railway the next
morning. Beware of hope, and beware of ambition! Each is
excellently tonic, like German competition, in moderation. But all
of you are suffering from self-indulgence in the first, and very
many of you are ruining your constitutions with the second. Be it
known unto you, my dear men and women, that existence rightly
considered is a fair compromise between two instincts--the
instinct of hoping one day to live, and the instinct to live here
and now. In most of you the first instinct has simply got the
other by the throat and is throttling it. Prepare to live by all
means, but for heaven's sake do not forget to live. You will never
have a better chance than you have at present. You may think you
will