Mr. Chesterton has written a whimsical 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 inferiors that she dares to do it. The goodness of her intentions carries no weight. Emma’s intentions are of the best, so far as she can separate them from her subconscious love of meddling. This ingenious comparison is very painful to Emma’s friends in the world of English readers. It cannot be that she is the ancestress of a type so vitally opposed to all that she holds correct and becoming. I do not share Mr. Chesterton’s violent hostility to reformers, even when they have no standard of taste. There are questions too big and pertinacious for taste to control. I only think it hard that, feeling as he does, he should compare Emma’s youthful indiscretions with more radical and disquieting activities. Emma is indiscreet, but she is only twenty-one. At twenty-two she is safely married to Mr. Knightley, and her period of indiscretion is over. At twenty-two she has fulfilled her destiny, has stepped into line, and, as the centre of the social unit, is harmoniously adjusted, not to Highbury alone, but to civilization and the long traditions of the ages. That she should regard her lover, even in her first glowing moments of happiness, as an agreeable companion, and as an assistant in the care of her father, is characteristic. “Self-respect, humour and hardness of heart” are out of hand with romance. So much the better for Mr. Knightley, who will never find his emotions drained, his wisdom questioned, his authority denied, and who will come in time to believe that he, and not his wife, is “absolute.” “The formal stars do travel so, That we their names and courses know; And he that on their changes looks Would think them govern’d by our books.”