human beings who are not beautiful, there are those who are not
healthy, there are those who hate people and things with much waste
of physical and mental energy, there are people who are not unwilling
to do others an ill turn by word or deed, and there are those who do
not believe that the original scheme of the race was ever a decent
one.

This is all abnormal and unintelligent, even the not being beautiful,
and sometimes one finds oneself called upon passionately to resist a
temptation to listen to an internal hint that the whole thing is
aimless. Upon this tendency one may as well put one's foot firmly, as
it leads nowhere. At such times it is supporting to call to mind a
certain undeniable fact which ought to loom up much larger in our
philosophical calculations. No one has ever made a collection of
statistics regarding the enormous number of perfectly sane, kind,
friendly, decent creatures who form a large proportion of any mass of
human beings anywhere and everywhere--people who are not vicious or
cruel or depraved, not as a result of continual self-control, but
simply because they do not want to be, because it is more natural and
agreeable to be exactly the opposite things; people who do not tell
lies because they could not do it with any pleasure, and would, on
the contrary, find the exertion an annoyance and a bore; people whose
manners and morals are good because their natural preference lies in
that direction. There are millions of them who in most essays on life
and living are virtually ignored because they do none of the things
which call forth eloquent condemnation or brilliant cynicism. It has
not yet become the fashion to record them. When one reads a daily
newspaper filled with dramatic elaborations of crimes and
unpleasantness, one sometimes wishes attention might be called to
them --to their numbers, to their decencies, to their normal lack of