As all thoughts and actions take place in time, so all material things exist in space. Everything we have must be in some place. To give things their right relations in space is one of the important aspects of conduct.
THE DUTY.
A place for everything, and everything in its place.—Things that belong together should be kept together. Dishes belong in the cupboard; clothes in the closet; boxes on the shelves; loose papers in the waste basket; tools in the tool-chest; wood in the wood-shed. And it is our duty to keep them in their proper place, when not in actual use. In business it is of the utmost importance to have a precise place for everything connected with it. The carpenter or machinist must have a place for each tool, and always put it there when he is through using it. The merchant must have a definite book and page or drawer or pigeon-hole for every item which he records. The scholar must have a set of cards or envelopes or drawers or pockets alphabetically arranged in which he keeps each class of facts where he can turn to it instantly. This keeping things of a kind together, each kind in a place by itself, is system. Without system nothing can be managed well, and no great enterprise can be carried on at all.
THE VIRTUE.
Orderliness is manly and virtuous because it keeps things under our own control, and makes them the expression of our will.—The orderly and systematic man can manage a thousand details with more ease and power than a man without order and system can manage a dozen. It is not power to do more work than other men, but power to do the same amount of work in such an orderly and systematic way that it accomplishes a hundred times as much as other men's work, which marks the difference between the statesman who manages the affairs of a nation or the merchant prince who handles millions of dollars, and the man of merely ordinary administrative and business ability.
THE REWARD.
The orderly man has his resources at his disposal at a moment's notice.—He can go directly to the thing he wants and be sure of finding it in its place. When a business is thoroughly systematized it is as easy to find one thing out of ten thousand as it is to find one thing out of ten. Hence there is scarcely any limit to the expansion of business of which the systematic man is capable. A business thus reduced to system will almost run itself. Thus the heads of great concerns are able to accept public office, or to spend a year in Europe, in absolute confidence that the business will be well conducted in their absence, and that they can take it up when they return just as they left it. For they know that each man has his part of the work for which he is responsible; each process has its precise method by which it is to be performed; each account has its exact place where it is to be kept. Order and system are the keys to business success. Orderliness keeps things under our control, and the convenience and efficiency with which things serve us is the direct and necessary consequence of having them under control.
THE TEMPTATION.
System takes more labor to begin with, but in the long run system is the greatest labor-saving device in the world.—It takes ten times as long to hunt up a thing which we have left lying around the next time we want it, as it does to put it where it belongs at first. Yet, well as we know this fact, present and temporary ease seems of more consequence at the time of action than future and permanent convenience. Until by repeated exercise and painful discipline we make orderliness and system habitual and almost instinctive, the temptation to make the quickest and handiest disposition of things for which we have no immediate use will continue to beset our minds and betray our wills.
THE VICE OF DEFECT.