I have mentioned the Superman because Wells himself has reached a conception of aristocracy similar in certain respects to that of Nietzsche but in others wholly antagonistic. In _The Food of the Gods_ he certainly exhibits a sympathy with Nietzsche on the poetical and ideal side; for his giants are not simply grand-children of Rabelais, they practise of necessity a morality at variance with that of the little men among whom they grow. When Caddies comes to London he does not, and cannot, expect the little men to feed him; not intending evil and seeing merely that he must live, he sweeps the contents of a baker's shop into his mouth with just the unconcerned innocence of laws and prohibitions that a child would feel before a blackberry bush. The very existence of a larger, freer race implies a larger and freer morality, and the giants and the little folk alike see that the same world cannot for long contain them both. But perhaps one can mark the distinction by saying that, unlike the Superman, they are not masters but servants of the cosmic process. They themselves are not the goal toward which the whole creation tends. Humanity is not a setting for their splendor, but something that wins through them its own significance. In fact it fully proves how profound is the socialistic instinct in Wells, that though in English wise and almost in the manner of Carlyle he has come to believe in the great ones of this world, he has never lost the invincible socialist conviction that a great man is only a figure of speech. In _The Discovery of the Future_ he says: "I must confess that I believe that if by some juggling with space and time Julius Cæsar, Napoleon, Edward IV, William the Conqueror, Lord Rosebery, and Robert Burns had all been changed at birth, it would not have produced any serious dislocation of the course of destiny. I believe that these great men of ours are no more than images and symbols and instruments taken, as it were, haphazard by the incessant and consistent forces behind them." The individual who stands on his achievement, the "lord of creation," is to him at best a little misinformed, at the worst blustering, dishonest, presuming, absurd.