Page:Under Dispute (1924).pdf/222

 sical and fault-finding paper entitled "The Evolution of Emma," in which he assumes that this embodiment of domesticity is the prototype of the modern welfare worker who runs birth-control meetings and baby weeks, urges maternity bills upon legislators, prates about segregation, and preaches eugenics and sex hygiene to a world that knows a great deal more about such matters than she does. Emma, says Mr. Chesterton, considers that because she is more genteel than Harriet Smith she is privileged to alienate this humble friend from Robert Martin who wants to marry her, and fling her at the head of Mr. Elton who doesn't. Precisely the same spirit—so he asserts—induces the welfare worker to conceive that her greater gentility (she sometimes calls it intelligence) warrants her gross intrusion into the lives of people who are her social inferiors. It is because they are her social in-