Once, perhaps in a parable¹, the plain man travelling met another traveller. And the plain man demanded of the traveller:

 

“Where are you going to?”

 

The traveller replied:

 

“Now I come to think of it, I don’t know.”

 

The plain man was ruffled² by this insensate answer. He said:

 

“But you are travelling?”

 

The traveller replied:

 

“Yes.”

 

The plain man, beginning to be annoyed, said:

 

“Have you never asked yourself where you are going to?”

 

“I have not.”

 

“But do you mean to tell me,” protested the plain man, now irritated, “that you are putting yourself to all this trouble, peril³, and expense of trains and steamers, without having asked yourself where you are going to?”

 

“It never occurred to me,” the traveller admitted. “I just had to start and I started.”

 

Whereupon the plain man was, as too often with us plain men, staggered and deeply affronted⁴ by the illogical absurdity⁵ of human nature. “Was it conceivable,” he thought, “that this traveller, presumably in his senses—” etc. (You are familiar with the tone and the style, being a plain man yourself.) And he gave way to moral indignation.

 

Now I must here, in parenthesis⁶, firmly state that I happen to be a member of the Society for the Suppression of Moral Indignation. As such, I object to the plain man’s moral indignation against the traveller; and I think that a liability to moral indignation is one of the plain man’s most serious defects. As such, my endeavour is to avoid being staggered and deeply affronted, or even surprised, by human

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