I
have no interest in Berkeley Street. I think it is you who are going
there, and why are you putting me to inconvenience merely that you may
the more easily find your way?" Should I answer so, he would think and
possibly say, "There are strange people in Cambridge, remoter from
human kind than any known elsewhere." Every one would feel
astonishment at the man who declined to bear his little portion of a
neighbor's burden. Our commonest acceptance of society involves self-
sacrifice, and in all our trivial intercourse we expect to put
ourselves to unrewarded inconvenience for the sake of others.
VII
What I have set myself to make plain in this series of graded examples
is simply this: self-sacrifice is not something exceptional, something
occurring at crises of our lives, something for which we need
perpetually to be preparing ourselves, so that when the great occasion
comes we may be ready to lay ourselves upon its altar. Such
romanticism distorts and obscures. Self-sacrifice is an everyday
affair. By it we live. It is the very air of our moral lungs. Without
it society could not go on for an hour. And that is precisely why we
reverence it so--not for its rarity, but for its importance. Nothing
else, I suppose, so instantly calls on the beholder for a bowing of
the head.
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