And such or nearly such is this career. Tono-Bungay, that swindling patent medicine without value or meaning, is the insubstantial hippogriff upon which Uncle Ponderevo soars upward on the wind of advertisement. In a society whose basis is unlimited individual rights, he is able to disorganize the industrial world and to work out his absurd, inept, extravagant destiny, scattering ruin right and left. But the spirit of Good Will, the disinterested constructive spirit of socialism which is the underlying assumption of Wells, appears here as in all his later books. Out of the wreckage the constructive purpose emerges, in the person of George Ponderevo. It shapes itself as a steel destroyer, the work of an engineer's brain, a destroyer which England has refused and which plunges down the Thames to the open sea, the symbol of man's intentions, without illusions and without the hope of personal gain, the disinterested spirit of science and truth. CHAPTER III SOCIALISM TRUE AND FALSE In the development of intellectual modesty lies the growth of statesmanship. It has been the chronic mistake of statecraft and all organizing spirits to attempt immediately to scheme and arrange and achieve. Priests, schools of thought, political schemers, leaders of men, have always slipped into the error of assuming that they can think out the whole--or, at any rate, completely think out definite parts--of the purpose and future of man, clearly and finally; they have set themselves to legislate and construct on that assumption, and, experiencing the perplexing obduracy and evasions of reality, they have taken to dogma, persecution, training, pruning, secretive education, and all the stupidities of self-sufficient energy. The man who wrote that is not what is called a whole-hearted man as regards any form of group-action. He does not "fit in." He is at bottom a sceptic, and a sceptic is one who reduces every question to the question of human nature. So that the socialism of Wells is necessarily at variance with all the recognized group-forms of socialism, Administrative, Philanthropic, and Revolutionary. I must briefly indicate in each case what is the quality of this divergence.