aziness is a vice because it sacrifices the
permanent interest of self-support to the temporary inclination to
indolence and ease. The lazy man is the slave of his own feelings. His
body is his master; not his servant. He is the slave of circumstances.
What he does depends not on what he knows it is best to do, but on how
he happens to feel. If the work is hard; if it is cold or rainy; if
something breaks; or things do not go to suit him, he gives up and
leaves the work undone. He is always waiting for something to turn up;
and since nothing turns up for our benefit except what we turn up
ourselves, he never finds the opportunity that suits him; he fails in
whatever he undertakes: and accomplishes nothing. Laziness is weakness,
submission, defeat, slavery to feeling and circumstance; and these are
the universal characteristics of vice.

THE VICE OF EXCESS.

+The folly of overwork.+--Work has for its end self-support. Work wisely
directed makes leisure possible. Overwork is work for its own sake; work
for false and unreal ends; work that exhausts the physical powers.
Overwork makes a man a slave to his work, as laziness makes him a slave
to his ease. The man who makes haste to be rich; who works from morning
until night "on the clean jump"; who drives his business with the fierce
determination to get ahead of his competitors at all hazards, misses the
quiet joys of life to which the wealth he pursues in such hot haste is
merely the means, breaks down in early or middle life, and destroys the
physical basis on which both work and enjoyment depend. To undertake
more than we can do without excessive wear and tear and without
permanent injury to health and strength is wrong. Laziness is the more
ignoble vice; but the folly of overwork is equally apparent, and its
results are equally disastrous. Laziness is a rot that consumes the base
elements of society. Overwork is a tempest that strikes down the bravest
and best. That work alone is wrought in virtue which keeps the powers up
to their normal and healthful activity, and is subordinated to the end
of self-support and harmonious self-development. The ideal attitude
toward work is beautifully presented in Matthew Arnold's sonnet on
"Quiet Work":

One lesson, Nature, let me learn of thee,
One lesson which in every wind is blown;
One lesson of two duties kept at one
Though the loud world proclaim their enmity--

Of toil unsevered from tranquillity