Wairarapa Daily Times [ESTABLISHED OVER 50 YEARS.] MONDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 1926. DEAN INGE ON ENGLAND.

Wairarapa Daily Times, 29 November 1926, Page 4

Wairarapa Daily Times [ESTABLISHED OVER 50 YEARS.] MONDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 1926. DEAN INGE ON ENGLAND.

We are accustomed to doleful deliverances from Dean Inge, but in “England ” he has surpassed himself in melancholy. “I have tried to be candid,” he says at the outset. “I have made no attempt whatever to be impartial.” That is to say, lie has approached his subject with a bias towards pessimism. It is as though for his survey hq had put on smoked spectacles through which everything appears sombre and depressing. Yet he is not without a ray of comfort. “I have not paintc-d a bright picture of the of my country,” lie writes in the, epilogue. “It is quite true that in my opinion the waters which we have now to navigate are likely to be stormy, and that the anti-social ferments within the nation are unusually strong. But just as a healthy body generates anti-toxins to combat any virulent infection, so our nation may be vigorous enough to neutralise the poisons which now threaten our civilisation with death. Nothing but good can be done by calling attention to perils which exist, and which may easily escape due attention amid the bottomless insincerity of modern politics and political journalism.” These perils the Dean proceeds to enumerate, hoping, but hardly expecting, that England will be warned in time. Economically, England is in a bad way, and the only prospect of a revival of agriculture, lie maintains, lies in the probability that before long countries which, now -supply her with food will have no surplus to export) Connected -with the decline of the countryside is the industrial unrest which amounts almost to perpetual civil war. The explanation is psychological. The transplantation of the countryside, within three or fjpur generations, to the unnatural environment of the large towns, has produced a chronic malaise. “The town-worker does not consciously recognise the call of the country; he only

feels .the aching of racial habits thousands of years old, and now suddenly thwarted.” The national fibre is being sapped. A most sinister phenomenon is the docility of the working class to a junta. “There has boon nothing like it in history.” Sturdy independence used to be the outstanding characteristic of the English worker. Now lie takes his orders meekly from an irresponsible tyrant disguised as a trades union official. Also, the English arc lazy, says the Dean. Laziness is a vice which they “share with the natives of some hot countries, but with no other northern Europeans. It is, of course, by uo means confined to the working class.” And while the young folk can still rise to an emergency as in the Great War and the general strike, Dean luge thinks that during the war the behaviour of the masses of the people left something to be desired. They “steadily refused ,to bear any considerable part of the financial burden. . . and they exacted as. the price of their loyalty a pledge that their economic position should be actually improved, in spite of the enormous sacrifices made by the nation as a whole. ’ ’