A reading of the revised edition of Dean Inge's England
- admirable so long as it is merely historical—provokes certain reflections. The Dean himself enjoys a salary of £2,000 a year and a house, and the discharge of his official duties has left him leisure to supplement that not contemptible income very considerably by his contributions to evening papers and other forms of journalism. Thus buttressed against fortune he launches in the volume in question a sustained attack on the working-classes of this country generally and the unemployed in particular. References to " perpetual sops to Cerberus in the way of doles, pensions and tribute of every kind " ; to " the fact that the country is in a state of chronic civil war "—(this after unemployment has been over the two million mark for years without a single organized disturbance) ; to the Speenhamland system of doles out of rates and " its application after the Great War on a still more disastrous scale "—all this would come somehow with rather more grace from one whose own seat was a little less amply cushioned and who was not committed to the doctrine that we are members one of another. The prayer for the gift of daily bread has been answered lavishly enough in Dean Inge's case. He seems to regard it as an outrage that it should be answered at all in the case of the unemployed man—or his wife or his child. * *
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