When asked how he managed to accomplish so much work, and at the same time attend to his social duties, a French statesman replied, "I do it simply by never postponing till to-morrow what should be done to-day." It was said of an unsuccessful public man that he used to reverse this process, his favorite maxim being "never to do to-day what might be postponed till to-morrow." How many men have dawdled away their success and allowed companions and relatives to steal it away five minutes at a time!
"To-morrow, didst thou say?" asked Cotton. "Go to—I will not hear of it. To-morrow! 'tis a sharper who stakes his penury against thy plenty—who takes thy ready cash and pays thee naught but wishes, hopes, and promises, the currency of idiots. To-morrow! it is a period nowhere to be found in all the hoary registers of time, unless perchance in the fool's calendar. Wisdom disclaims the word, nor holds society with those that own it. 'Tis fancy's child, and folly is its father; wrought of such stuffs as dreams are; and baseless as the fantastic visions of the evening." Oh, how many a wreck on the road to success could say: "I have spent all my life in pursuit of to-morrow, being assured that to-morrow has some vast benefit or other in store for me."
"But his resolutions remained unshaken," Charles Reade continues in his story of Noah Skinner, the defaulting clerk, who had been overcome by a sleepy languor after deciding to make restitution; "by and by, waking up from a sort of heavy doze, he took, as it were, a last look at the receipts, and murmured, 'My head, how heavy it feels!' But presently he roused himself, full of his penitent resolutions, and murmured again, brokenly, 'I'll take it to—Pembroke—Street to—morrow; to—morrow.' The morrow found him, and so did the detectives, dead."
"To-morrow." It is the devil's motto. All history is strewn with its brilliant victims, the wrecks of half-finished plans and unexecuted resolutions. It is the favorite refuge of sloth and incompetency.
"Strike while the iron is hot," and "Make hay while the sun shines," are golden maxims.
Very few people recognize the hour when laziness begins to set in. Some people it attacks after dinner; some after lunch; and some after seven o'clock in the evening. There is in every person's life a crucial hour in the day, which must be employed instead of wasted if the day is to be saved. With most people the early morning hour becomes the test of the day's success.
A person was once extolling the skill and courage of Mayenne in Henry's presence. "You are right," said Henry, "he is a great captain, but I have always five hours' start of him." Henry rose at four in the morning, and Mayenne at about ten. This made all the difference between them. Indecision becomes a disease and procrastination is its forerunner. There is only one known remedy for the victims of indecision, and that is prompt decision. Otherwise the disease is fatal to all success or achievement. He who hesitates is lost.
A noted writer says that a bed is a bundle of paradoxes. We go to it with reluctance, yet we quit it with regret. We make up our minds every night to leave it early, but we make up our bodies every morning to keep it late.
Yet most of those who have become eminent have been early risers. Peter the Great always rose before daylight. "I am," said he, "for making my life as long as possible, and therefore sleep as little as possible." Alfred the Great rose before daylight. In the hours of early morning Columbus planned his voyage to America, and Napoleon his greatest campaigns. Copernicus was an early riser, as were most of the famous astronomers of ancient and modern times. Bryant rose at five, Bancroft at dawn, and nearly all our leading authors in the early morning. Washington, Jefferson, Webster, Clay, and Calhoun were all early risers.
Daniel Webster used often to answer twenty to thirty letters before breakfast.