I said the affair was a miracle.  Is it not?

You have to live on this twenty-four hours of daily time.  Out of it you have to spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect, and the evolution of your immortal soul.  Its right use, its most effective use, is a matter of the highest urgency and of the most thrilling actuality.  All depends on that.  Your happiness—­the elusive prize that you are all clutching for, my friends!—­depends on that.  Strange that the newspapers, so enterprising and up-to-date as they are, are not full of “How to live on a given income of time,” instead of “How to live on a given income of money”!  Money is far commoner than time.  When one reflects, one perceives that money is just about the commonest thing there is.  It encumbers the earth in gross heaps.

If one can’t contrive to live on a certain income of money, one earns a little more—­or steals it, or advertises for it.  One doesn’t necessarily muddle one’s life because one can’t quite manage on a thousand pounds a year; one braces the muscles and makes it guineas, and balances the budget.  But if one cannot arrange that an income of twenty-four hours a day shall exactly cover all proper items of expenditure, one does muddle one’s life definitely.  The supply of time, though gloriously regular, is cruelly restricted.

Which of us lives on twenty-four hours a day?  And when I say “lives,” I do not mean exists, nor “muddles through.”  Which of us is free from that uneasy feeling that the “great spending departments” of his daily life are not managed as they ought to be?  Which of us is quite sure that his fine suit is not surmounted by a shameful hat, or that in attending to the crockery he has forgotten the quality of the food?  Which of us is not saying to himself—­ which of us has not been saying to himself all his life:  “I shall alter that when I have a little more time”?

We never shall have any more time.  We have, and we have always had, all the time there is.  It is the realisation of this profound and neglected truth (which, by the way, I have not discovered) that has led me to the minute practical examination of daily time-expenditure.

II

THE DESIRE TO EXCEED ONE’S PROGRAMME

“But,” someone may remark, with the English disregard of everything except the point, “what is he driving at with his twenty-four hours a day?  I have no difficulty in living on twenty-four hours a day.  I do all that I want to do, and still find time to go in for newspaper competitions.  Surely it is a simple affair, knowing that one has only twenty-four hours a day, to content one’s self with twenty-four hours a day!”