The Birmingham age-herald., 1906-10-07
MASTER VICE.
As Such is Procrastination Described
 by Confessed Victim.

From the New York Sun.
 ''The bane of my existence" said the procrastinating man. "has been my habit of putting things off. l never do today what I can put off till tomorrow.
 "The result is that I am always putting things off, and never doing anything more than Is necessary for my current daily hand to mouth support; <nd so, as the saying is, l never have anything. am not independent, but always depend- ent upon somebody else for the work that will enable me to live. and so I can never say my soul Is my own. l must do the work I am set to do by some stronger man, whether I like 1t or not, and so I plod along. just getting through. while the man who collars things gets on.
 "Of late years, as l have come to realize It's evil effects and the enormous difficulty of overcoming 1t, I have come to think that the master vice of all Is procrastlna- ton. And coming to think thus has dis turbed me little, because have to give up an originally preconceved and long cherished notion.
 "I had long held that the most nearly ineradicable of personal vices was gam bling, but now I thought the most diff cult of all vices to cure oneself of was that of procrastinatlon. Was I wrong then? And could 1t be that l was wrong now?
 This. as I say disturbed me little; but now on this point I rest quite easy. For I have discovered. contradictory as this. at first thought, might seem. l have discovered that was right then and that I am right now
 For now I discover that the vice of gambling is but another phase of, or at least the outcrop of, that of procrastina- ton. The great ajority of those given tI.t. for nothing: they hope to get money with put effort. They put off from day to day the hard. unfinchng work that would give them a sure thing, without chances on the race of life. and make just enough to indulge their vice and their vain hopes.
 50 gambling is really but a form, or outcome, of the vice of procrastination And by the same line of reasoning I sup pose we might ssy the same of drunken ness, which is essentially procrastinat- ing vice; we put things off today-today we will drink; we will work tomorrow
 And I don't know but what we should find that every i'll proceeds from the vice of procrastination; and so this. which might seem but form of laziness. is real ly tho master vice, and I am one of it's most closely bound victims. I don't drink and I don't gamble. but I have got the fatal habit Of putting things off
 Inertia, dulness, lack of power from want of exercise, come from 1.-the pro- crastinating man is always at the same dead low level. He is always going to do something-never doing 1t; just pulling through with the work he has to do, and gaining correspondingly small rewards. He never knows the joy of doing things, nor gathers in its profits, but. habit bound. he settles down in lifetime sla- very
 And I am one of those victimsl Coca sionally I do rouse up and do something out of my set routine, and in the accom- plishing of some rugged task that thus take up find great new joy and pride; and I am going to keep this up. but next day I sink to the old level again, and stay there; it Is so much easier to put things off than to do things, and this the trunk bad habit of which all others are but franchises. is so deep rooted.
 But I am not without hope. I have topped off those branches of which I spoke, and I am prying around the roots of the trunk"