DEAN INGE, BEES AND OTHER THINGS.

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XIX, Issue 304, 10 December 1929, Page 7

DEAN INGE, BEES AND OTHER THINGS.

(To the Editor.) Sir, —The following quotations fram the sermon by Dean Inge published in Saturday’s “Tribune” seem to call for comment. “The best way, I think, of looking at cur class struggles is that they are a scramble for the enormous unearned increment created, not by capital, nor by labour, but by our new machinery. It cannot be said to belong to anybody and that is why it is fought for, as two hives of bees will massacre each other for a lump of honey lying between them.. The amount of this unearned wealth would be colossal if the possessors of it had not squandered most of it in fighting a kind of folly which the church has hitherto failed to stop. The workers also have sometimes diminished the national wealth by disloyal and unwise conspiracies • . .” Is it im-

plied that disloyal and unwise conspiracies are the general thing with the capitalists and so do not call for comment, or have the workers a monopoly in those lines? As a beekeepei for upwards of twenty-five years I can assure the good Dean that bees will not massacre each other for a lump of honey lying between two bives. The Divine mind that created bees placed a special safeguaid to prevent any tendency towards massacre of bees by bees for the mere possession of honey.

The claim that wealth is not created by capital or labour but by new machinery is reminiscent of Topsy statement that “She never had no mother; she just grew.” But while we may smile at the poor slave child it is a very serious matter when a great voice of the Church discloses a similar reasoning capacity, and thus display® the reason why “the church has hitherto tailed to stop” the folly he deplores. The Dean further states that be is inclined to think that right consumption is more important than right distribution. Has this great teacher yet to learn that illgotten wealth is most unlikely to be well spent; that, in a word, right distribution is the first essentia] to attain to right consumpion. In conclusion, mav 1 say that the spectacle ol the Dean, with eagle eye directed to the depravity of Americans the while his voice thanks God for the purity of English fiction, is painfully reminiscent of another who stood and thanked God that he was not as other men. Thanking you, Sir, in anticipation for the hospitality of your columns.— I am, etc., ARCH LOWE. Sunnybank. Hastings, 8/12/29. Is it not rather irrelevant to attack the illustration regarding the activities of bees, rather than the assertions implied in it? Dean Inge might have chosen Dr. Johnson’s illustration of the two puppies playing peacefully on the floor —“but throw a bone between them, and see what happens.” The Dean was not so much asserting that bees fight for honey as that classes, in his view, scramble for the unearned increment created by the new machinery. Owing to his lack of knowledge of bees in the hive, in the bonnet, or anywhere else, he may have been wrong in his use of the illustration. But that does not affect the validity of its application. -“Lector,” H.B.T.