Page:The Sunday Eight O'Clock (1916).pdf/102

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of delayed term papers, and postponed collateral reading, of neglected "sources" and forgotten notes. In the future he was to be a changed man.

It is difficult to correct the mistakes of today; it seems easy to avoid the errors of tomorrow. There is no one so kindly disposed toward virtue as the man whose immoralities have just brought him disaster; there is none so temperate as the man who is racked with the pain of last night's orgies; and no one so keen for intellectual achievement as the student who has just flunked.

It is the man who gets his work done today, not the one who swears he is going without fail to do it tomorrow, whose good resolutions count for anything. It is not the future but the present with which we should concern ourselves. There are few things so unsafe to deal with as futures. I have no doubt that Mr. Longfellow had the good resolutions of the college flunker in mind