But lest I be tempted to carry this latter suggestion too far just at this point, I pass on to his equally virulent dislike of Philanthropic socialism and the busy Superior Person in affairs; especially the type of political woman so dear to Mrs. Humphry Ward's heart. If the expert bureaucratic point of view represents the action of socialist thought on the Liberal Progressive mind, so also the philanthropic superior point of view represents the action of socialist thought on the Conservative mind. It is arrogant, aggressive, and condescending. It implies the raising of one's inferiors, and what weak mortal should assume that she (for this happens to be a mainly feminine affliction) is the standard according to which other mortals ought to be raised?
Two of these energetic ladies have been pictured with a bitter vividness by Wells in Altiora Bailey and Aunt Plessington, the former summing up the Fabian-expert view, the latter summing up the Superior-philanthropic view. Altiora has "P.B.P."--_pro bono publico_--engraved inside her wedding ring. All the misery of the world she marshals invincibly in statistics. She sees everything as existing in types and classes; she pushes her cause with a hard, scheming, and wholly self-centred eagerness, managing political dinners, indefatigably compiling blue-books, dreaming of a world nailed as tightly and firmly under the rule of experts as a carpet is nailed with brass tacks.
On the other hand Aunt Plessington is the incarnation of a "Movement" somewhat vague in purpose but always aggressively beneficial to the helpless ones of the earth. "Her voice was the true governing-class voice, a strangulated contralto, abundant and authoritative; it made everything she said clear and important, so that if she said it was a fine morning it was like leaded print in the _Times_." Her mission is principally to interfere with the habits and tastes of the working-class, making it impossible for them to buy tobacco and beer or "the less hygienic and more palatable forms of bread (which do not sufficiently stimulate the coatings of the stomach)." She is, in short, one of those odious managing people who know nothing of and care nothing for human nature, who concern themselves wholly with the effects without penetrating to the causes of misery, who see mankind as irrevocably divided into a governing and a governed class, and whose idea of government is to make the governed as uncomfortably efficient as possible and as lacking in free will. She is exactly one of those arrogant sterile souls, in love with methods rather than men, who have made the Servile State an imminent and horrid possibility and have turned so many misinformed human beings (including Tolstoy) against socialism altogether.