A man may desire to go to Mecca. His
conscience tells him that he ought to go to Mecca. He fares forth,
either by the aid of Cook's, or unassisted; he may probably never
reach Mecca; he may drown before he gets to Port Said; he may perish
ingloriously on the coast of the Red Sea; his desire may remain
eternally frustrate. Unfulfilled aspiration may always trouble him.
But he will not be tormented in the same way as the man who,
desiring to reach Mecca, and harried by the desire to reach Mecca,
never leaves Brixton.
It is something to have left Brixton. Most of us have not left
Brixton. We have not even taken a cab to Ludgate Circus and
inquired from Cook's the price of a conducted tour. And our excuse
to ourselves is that there are only twenty-four hours in the day.
If we further analyse our vague, uneasy aspiration, we shall, I
think, see that it springs from a fixed idea that we ought to do
something in addition to those things which we are loyally and
morally obliged to do. We are obliged, by various codes written and
unwritten, to maintain ourselves and our families (if any) in health
and comfort, to pay our debts, to save, to increase our prosperity
by increasing our efficiency.
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