and
distresses of poverty, the pride appears in the arrogant and aggressive
conception of raising one's fellows. I have no strong feeling for
the horrors and discomforts of poverty as such, sensibilities can be
hardened to endure the life led by the "Romans" in Dartmoor jail a
hundred years ago (See "The Story of Dartmoor Prison" by Basil Thomson
(Heinemann--1907).), or softened to detect the crumpled rose-leaf; what
disgusts me is the stupidity and warring purposes of which poverty is
the outcome. When it comes to the idea of raising human beings, I must
confess the only person I feel concerned about raising is H.G. Wells,
and that even in his case my energies might be better employed. After
all, presently he must die and the world will have done with him. His
output for the species is more important than his individual elevation.

Moreover, all this talk of raising implies a classification I doubt. I
find it hard to fix any standards that will determine who is above me
and who below. Most people are different from me I perceive, but
which among them is better, which worse? I have a certain power of
communicating with other minds, but what experiences I communicate
seem often far thinner and poorer stuff than those which others less
expressive than I half fail to communicate and half display to me.
My "inferiors," judged by the common social standards, seem indeed
intellectually more limited than I and with a narrower outlook; they
are often dirtier and more driven, more under the stress of hunger and
animal appetites; but on the other hand have they not more vigorous
sensations than I, and through sheer coarsening and hardening of fibre,
the power to do more toilsome things and sustain intenser sensations
than I could endure? When I sit upon the bench, a respectable
magistrate, and commit some battered reprobate for trial for this
lurid offence or that, or send him or her to prison for drunkenness or
such-like indecorum, the doubt drifts into my mind which of us after
all is indeed getting nearest to the keen edge of life. Are I and my
respectable colleagues much more than successful evasions of THAT?
Perhaps these people in the dock know more of the essential strains and
stresses of nature, are more intimate with pain. At any rate I do not
think I am justified in saying certainly that they do not know...

No, I do not want to raise people using my own position as a standard, I
do not want to be one of a gang of cons