Comfortable persons like, oh several I could mention, who have no way of walking with another postman’s legs or bending with another coolie’s back and who cannot understand why this should be called a distressful world which provides them regularly with tea and muffins, should go on naturally, to the end. They have their indifferent prototypes among the vegetables; though I have noticed that most flowers look with the eye of compassion upon life. They follow the simple lines upon which they were created, by which to live and not to observe is the chief end of man; there are a great many of them, thousands, in their protective skins all over the world; and they are only interesting of course to each other. Nevertheless no one should speak slightingly of them, for we all number them among our friends and relations, and constantly go and stay with them. Besides, I did not set out to be disagreeable at anybody’s expense. It was only borne in upon me that for us, the unhappy minority who have two sets of nerves, one for our own use and one at the disposal of every human failure by the wayside, the world is not likely to become a pleasanter place the longer one stays in it. If continual dropping will wear away a stone, continual rubbing will wear away a skin, and happy is he or she, after sixty or seventy years’ contact with the misery of life, who arrives at the grave with a whole one. I do not deny that there are poultices. One of them is a thing Tiglath-Pileser sometimes says--that it is stupid to talk about the aggregate of human woe, since all the pain as well as all the pleasure of the world is summed up in the individual and limited by him. A battle is really no more than the killing of a soldier, a famine is comprised in a death by starvation. The unit of experience refuses to merge in the mass; you cannot multiply beyond one. I do not think much of this emollient, but such as it is I will apply it if another coolie comes in with charcoal.