I am assured, in accents of unmistakable sincerity, that there are
many business men--not merely those in high positions or with fine
prospects, but modest subordinates with no hope of ever being
much better off--who do enjoy their business functions, who do not
shirk them, who do not arrive at the office as late as possible and
depart as early as possible, who, in a word, put the whole of their
force into their day's work and are genuinely fatigued at the end
thereof.

I am ready to believe it. I do believe it. I know it. I always
knew it. Both in London and in the provinces it has been my lot to
spend long years in subordinate situations of business; and the fact
did not escape me that a certain proportion of my peers showed what
amounted to an honest passion for their duties, and that while
engaged in those duties they were really *living* to the fullest
extent of which they were capable. But I remain convinced that
these fortunate and happy individuals (happier perhaps than they
guessed) did not and do not constitute a majority, or anything like
a majority. I remain convinced that the majority of decent average
conscientious men of business (men with aspirations and ideals) do
not as a rule go home of a night genuinely tired. I remain
convinced that they put not as much but as little of themselves as
they conscientiously can into the earning of a livelihood, and that
their vocation bores rather than interests them.

Nevertheless, I admit that the minority is of sufficient importance
to merit attention, and that I ought not to have ignored it so
completely as I did do. The whole difficulty of the hard-working
minority was put in a single colloquial sentence by one of my