George Meredith is one of the few thoughtful and non-socialistic writers who have had the courage to say what they felt about this class of parasites on the community. In Chapter XXIII of _One of our Conquerors_ he speaks of these “comfortable annuitants under clerical shepherding, close upon outnumbering the labourers they paralyse at home and stultify abroad.”[135] But since his references to them occur in a work of fiction they are hardly elaborate enough to be telling, or frequent enough to have aroused comment or to have formed the basis of a doctrine. Certainly one does not require to be infected with socialistic or communistic views to feel that the vast number of these spinsters’ mansions all over the country is a bane rather than a boon. From no political point of view, whether monarchic, aristocratic, oligarchic, democratic or socialistic, is it possible to justify them, and since the very energy which they devote to their humanitarian form of sex-compensation is frequently as misguided as it is only a partial remedy for the harm they themselves are doing, they constitute a portion of the community that must be honestly and utterly condemned by every far-seeing thinker on the subject. To reply to this by a shrug of the shoulders and the question, “What would you do with them?” is simply foolish. The first great reform consists in getting them to be regarded no longer as a harmless or beneficent section of the community, but as a dangerous and intolerable bane. Once this transmutation of public opinion has been achieved, it is not a difficult matter to decide what should be done with them. I invite any reader to take a walking tour through this country of England, and to count the number of such parasitic females he can find in a month’s tour. I invite him to note the grandeur of their establishments compared with the meanness and poverty of those about them who really belong to Life’s main stream, or are directly assisting it; and if that experience does not convince him of the dangerous futility of the class as a whole, he must be possessed of very singular views concerning the proper organization of social life. Even on their death-beds these creatures do not cease to scourge the community to which they belong; for in the very agony of death they bequeath their wealth and dispose of their other property in a manner which, while it is usually thoroughly ill-advised, constitutes but one last fierce effort to stamp the belief in their importance for ever on the minds of those who survive them.