Begin with yourself, if you dont mind. Ive a good deal of
business to do still before I die. Havnt you?

THE MAN. No. Thats just it: Ive no business to do. Do you know
what my life is? I spend my days from nine to six--nine hours of
daylight and fresh air--in a stuffy little den counting another man's
money. Ive an intellect: a mind and a brain and a soul; and the use
he makes of them is to fix them on his tuppences and his
eighteenpences and his two pound seventeen and tenpences and see how
much they come to at the end of the day and take care that no one
steals them. I enter and enter, and add and add, and take money and
give change, and fill cheques and stamp receipts; and not a penny of
that money is my own: not one of those transactions has the smallest
interest for me or anyone else in the world but him; and even he
couldnt stand it if he had to do it all himself. And I'm envied:
aye, envied for the variety and liveliness of my job, by the poor
devil of a bookkeeper that has to copy all my entries over again.
Fifty thousand entries a year that poor wretch makes; and not ten out
of the fifty thousand ever has to be referred to again; and when all
the figures are counted up and the balance sheet made out, the boss
isnt a penny the richer than he'd be if bookkeeping had never been
invented. Of all the damnable waste of human life that ever was
invented, clerking is the very worst.

TARLETON. Why not join the territorials?

THE MAN. Because I shouldnt be let. He hasnt even the sense to see
that it would pay him to get some cheap soldiering out of me. How can
a man tied to a desk from nine to six be anything--be even a man, let
alone a soldier? But I'll teach him and you a lesson. Ive had enough
of living a dog's life and despising myself for it. Ive had enough of
being talked down to by hogs like you, and wearing my life out for a
salary that wouldnt keep you in cigars. Youll never believe that a
clerk's a man until one of us makes an example of one of you.

TARLETON. Despotism tempered by assassination, eh?

THE MAN. Yes. Thats what they do in Russia. Well, a business office
is Russia as far as the clerks are concerned. So dont you take it so
coolly. You think I'm not going to do it; but I am.

TARLETON. _[rising and facing him]_ Come, now, as man to man! It's
not my fault that youre poorer than I am; and it's not your fault that
I'm richer than you. And if you could undo all tha