The New Zealand TABLET WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 1, 1924. DEAN INGE, CAPITALIST

New Zealand Tablet, Volume LI, Issue 41, 1 October 1924, Page 34

The New Zealand TABLET WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 1, 1924. DEAN INGE, CAPITALIST

HE person called “the gloomy Dean” is one of the amazing products of the Church of Englaud which claims to be Catholic and at the fM same which claims be Catholic and sorts of JL same time covers with its mantle all sorts of freaks and heretics. The Dean’s aberrations are not confined to the Thirty-Nine Articles. Co moral questions he has more than once * iSf expressed views that no Christian could hold. He sailed near the wind on suicide// he is dirty with the pitch of the Malthusians; he is a Capitalist Christian, which works out as a no-thing, or a non ens. While able and scholarly critics like Mr. Belloc have called him to order for his calumnies concerning Catholics, voices from within his own Fold have warned him that tactics and antics which are usually associated with Colonial ranters are not seemly in a Dean of St. Paul’s. And, last but by no means least, he receives a sound drubbing, on the score of his pagan economic views, from one T. M. Watson in the official organ of the Socialist Labor Party of Great Britain. * The Dean and a Mr. Julian Huxley have been contributing to The New Leader a series of articles on the important topic of racial development. They say they believe that the world is overpopulated, and their remedy is to reduce the population, on a eugenic basis and by Malthusian method. Probably what they they mean is that Labor is becoming too powerful and Capitalists would reign longer if such immoral devices were made more popular among the poor. They can hardly convince any sane personthat the world is over-populated; and they themselves are not exactly apodictic proofs of the superiority of the West End dwellers over the inhabitants of the slums. The Socialist critic flays the Dean alive To-day men starve but there is no famine. The contrary is the case. Markets are glutted with every conceivable commodity. In America last year thousands of bushels of wheat were burned while children cried for bread. Warehouses are crammed full of boots and warm clothing and yet children go ill-clad to school; in the fishing-centres boat loads of fish are tossed back into the sea while people beg for food; in the fruitgrowing districts tons of fruit are left to lie and rot; in agricultural districts pigs were fed with the surplus

stock of potatoes; cheese and butter are kept until putrid and then sold to soap manufacturers. Birth control be hanged! .- . . There is more food than can be eaten, more clothing than can be worn; there is plenty for all. . . If the population were nine times greater than .it is to-day there would be still more commodities to consume. Capitalism, with its hands on the purse-strings, suggests Malthus. The working man hints that the Reverend Dean might find a more appropriate remedy in the Sermon on the Mount. Note that Ramsay MacDonald has more than once .said the same thing, to the evident confusion of the Lloyd Georges and the readers of the London Times. "Apply the maxims of the Sermon on the Mount to actual life!" says Lloyd George. "It would never do at all, at all." And the old Times, backer of the murderous Irish landlords and their crowbar brigades, seems equally concerned. "Drive out the Irish," said the Times not long ago. "Exterminate the workers," says Dean Inge to-day: for that is what his advocacy of birth-control comes to when reduced to plain talk. Of course, like all Jingoes, the Dean is to himself a Superman. That is the correct British Capitalist attitude. The poor man must be inferior to the rich man: how could the mill-hands whom, he has starved be the equals of the owner who has grown fat on sweat and blood ? How could the hunted and persecuted peasants be compared to Clanriearde, who made millions out of their blood? And it is such silliness and such tomfoolery that have left the Dean and those like him where they are at the present day. They and their friends made a horrible muddle of Europe, and a Labor Government, composed of workers mainly, has at present the task of making good the wreck and ruin left behind by those who did their friends if they did not do their bit in the Great War. Here, too, we have much of the same sort of nonsense: it will last longer here than elsewhere. We have jobbery engineered by Capitalists we have race-suicide in a country not carrying a hundredth part of the population it ought to have; we have the silly twaddle about the Flag and the Oath and loyalty, dragged in at all sorts of times to provide a mantle for the faults of alleged politicians. # One other passage from the Dean's critic: I wonder if Dean Inge has ever speculated on the possibility that the inhabitants of the slums whom he abhors with all the generosity of a Christian are the most intelligent section of the community? Every week .in every back alley thousands, aye, millions, of events happen which border on the miraculous : events which the Dean has never taken into his reasoning. There are women who pay rent, feed and clothe twelve persons on a pound a week, and even less. Does the Dean think that a person who can accomplish that formidable task is a weakling, either physically or mentally? Has the Dean, with all his chances, with his classical education, and his knowledge of theology, ever accomplished anything half so wonderful as this?' ' He has not—and never will! No, my dear Dean the scum never lies at the bottom, but always rises to the top. ~ . . Plain talk, my masters. ' But when a person posing as a preacher of the Gospel advocates race-suicide he deserves a castigation.. Even the allusion to the scum coming to the top is not too strong to meet the case of this clerical dignitary, the "gloomy Dean." The other day we read in a French review a pathetic and eloquent article on the decay of the population of France through the falling birthrate. French patriots are bewailing the fact and pointing with, accusing fingers to the stern statistics; while in England Anglican Deans and other British gentlemen are saying that England can be saved by following Franco to ruin!