‘But I do not wish to be personal. Let us take the case of Mr. Flack, who died last week, unknown. His discerning friends said of him: “He had a wonderful financial gift. If he’d concentrated on it, he might have rivalled Harriman. But he wouldn’t concentrate either on that or on anything else. He was interested in too many different subjects--books, pictures, music, travel, physical science, love, economics--in fact, everything interested him, and he was always interested in something. He was too all-round. He frittered his energy away, and wasted enormous quantities of time. And so he never succeeded.” ‘Such was the verdict of some of Flack’s admirers. But it occurs to me that Flack may have succeeded after all. Certainly he did not succeed in being a financial magnate. But he succeeded in being interested in a large number of things, and therefore in having a wide mind. He succeeded in being always interested. And he succeeded in not being lop-sided, which men of one supreme desire as a rule are. (Men who are successful in the narrow sense generally pay a fearful price for their success.) His friends regret that he wasted his time, but really, if he accomplished all that he admittedly did accomplish, he couldn’t have wasted a very great deal of time. ‘Quite possibly the late Mr. Flack used to wake up in the night and curse himself because he could not concentrate, and because he could not stick to one thing, and because he wasted his time, and because, with all his gifts, he did not materially progress, and because he made no impression on the great public. Quite possibly, in moments of gloom, he had regrets about the dissipation of his energy. But he could not honestly have regarded himself as a failure. ‘I should like to know why it is necessarily more righteous to confine one’s energy to a single direction than to let it spread out in various directions. It is not more righteous. If a man has one imperious desire, his righteousness is to satisfy it fully. But if a man has many mild, equal desires, _his_ righteousness is to satisfy all of them as reasonably well as circumstances permit. And I see no reason why one should be deemed more successful than the other.