Suppose a man's children have gone swimming; suppose he is
suddenly throttled by the senseless--fear that they are drowned.
The obvious answer is, "Only one man in a thousand has his
children drowned." But a deeper voice (deeper, being as deep
as hell) answers, "And why should not you--be the thousandth man?"
What is true of tragic doubt is true also of trivial doubt.
The voter's guardian devil said to him, "If you don't vote
to-day you can do fifteen things which will quite certainly do
some good somewhere, please a friend, please a child, please a
maddened publisher. And what good do you expect to do by voting?
You don't think your man will get in by one vote, do you?"
To this he knew the answer of common sense, "But if everybody
said that, nobody would get in at all." And then there came
that deeper voice from Hades, "But you are not settling what
everybody shall do, but what one person on one occasion shall do.
If this afternoon you went your way about more solid things,
how would it matter and who would ever know?" Yet somehow the voter
drove on blindly through the blackening London roads, and found
somewhere a tedious polling station and recorded his tiny vote.
The politician for whom the voter had voted got in by five hundred
and fifty-five votes. The voter read this next morning at breakfast,
being in a more cheery and expansive mood, and found something
very fascinating not merely in the fact of the majority, but even
in the form of it.
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