W

FIND A HOBBY

This is the main question, with what activity one’s

leisure is filled.

—ARISTOTLE

illiam Gladstone, the four-time prime minister of England, in
the generation before Winston Churchill, had an unusual
hobby. He loved going out into the woods near his home and
chopping down trees.
Huge trees. By hand.
In January 1876, he spent two full days working on an elm tree
with a girth of some sixteen feet. From Gladstone’s diary, we note
that on more than one thousand occasions he went to the forest with
his axe, often bringing his family along and making an outing of it. It
was said that he found the process so consuming, he had no time to
think of anything but where the next stroke of his axe would fall.
Many critics, one of whom happened to be Churchill’s father,
criticized Gladstone’s hobby as destructive. It really wasn’t.
Gladstone planted many trees in his life, pruned hundreds more, and
aggressively protected the health of the forests near his home,
believing that removing dead or decaying trees was a minor but
important service. In response to some critics who questioned why
he had taken down a particular oak, he explained that removing the
rotten members from the forest allowed more light and air to get to
the good trees—just as in politics (a joke for which he was promptly