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.
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