one thing it shifts on to another. If one man has not the toil
of preparing a man's chin, I suppose that some other man has the toil
of preparing something very curious to put on a man's chin.
It would be nice if we could be shaved without troubling anybody.
It would be nicer still if we could go unshaved without annoying anybody--

"'But, O wise friend, chief Barber of the Strand,
Brother, nor you nor I have made the world.'

"Whoever made it, who is wiser, and we hope better than we, made it
under strange limitations, and with painful conditions of pleasure.

"In the first and darkest of its books it is fiercely written
that a man shall not eat his cake and have it; and though
all men talked until the stars were old it would still be true
that a man who has lost his razor could not shave with it.
But every now and then men jump up with the new something
or other and say that everything can be had without sacrifice,
that bad is good if you are only enlightened, and that there
is no real difference between being shaved and not being shaved.
The difference, they say, is only a difference of degree;
everything is evolutionary and relative. Shavedness is
immanent in man. Every ten-penny nail is a Potential Razor.
The superstitious people of the past (they say) believed that
a lot of black bristles standing out at right angles to one's
face was a positive affair. But the higher criticism teaches
us better. Bristles are merely negative. They are a Shadow
where Shaving should be.

"Well, it all goes on, and I suppose it all means something.