I was putting on my boots just now in what the novelists call “a brown study.”  There was no urgent reason for putting on my boots.  I was not going out, and my slippers were much more comfortable.  But something had to be done.  I wanted a subject for an article.  Now if you are accustomed to writing articles for a living, you will know that sometimes the difficulty is not writing the article, but choosing a subject.  It is not that subjects are few:  it is that they are so many.  It is not poverty you suffer from, but an embarrassment of riches.  You are like Buridan’s ass.  That wretched creature starved between two bundles of hay, because he could not make up his mind which bundle to turn to first.  And in that he was not unlike many human beings.  There was an eighteenth-century statesman, for example, who used to find it so difficult to make a choice that he would stand at his door looking up the street and down the street, and finally go inside again, because he couldn’t decide whether to go up or down.  He would stay indoors all the morning considering whether he should ride out or walk out, and he would spend all the afternoon regretting that he had done neither one nor the other.

I have always had a great deal of sympathy with that personage, for I share his temperamental indecision.  I hate making up my mind.  If I go into a shop to choose a pair of trousers my infirmity of purpose grows with every new sample that is shown me, and finally I choose the wrong thing in a fit of desperation.  If the question is a place for a holiday, all the artifices of my family cannot extract from me a decided preference for any place in particular.  Bournemouth?  Certainly.  How jolly that walk along the sands by Poole Harbour to Studland and over the hills to Swanage.  But think of the Lake District ... and North Wales ... and Devon ... and Cornwall ... and ...  I do not so much make decisions as drift into them or fall into them.  I am what you might call an Eleventh Hour Man.  I take a header just as the clock is about to strike for the last time.

This common failing of indecision is not necessarily due to intellectual laziness.  It may be due, as in the case of Goschen, to too clear a vision of all the aspects of a subject.  “Goschen,” said a famous First Sea Lord, “was the cleverest man we ever had at the Admiralty, and the worst administrator.  He saw so many sides to a question that we could never get anything done.”  A sense of responsibility, too, is a severe check on action.  I doubt whether any one who has dealt with affairs ever made up his mind with more painful questionings than Lord Morley.  I have heard him say how burdensome he found the India Office, because day by day he had to make irrevocable decisions.  A certain adventurous recklessness is necessary for the man of affairs.  Joseph Chamberlain had that quality.  Mr. Churchill has it to-day.  If it is controlled by high motives and a wide vision it is an incomparable gift.  If it is a mere passion for having one’s own way it is only the gift of the gambler.