LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Making Ends Meet
Sta.—May I submit the following comments on the very interesting and forthright letter from Mr. F. Barber, which seems to me to raise issues of paramount importance?
When Mr. Barber claims that production depends entirely on the workers, who alone can give real value to the money amounts of the pensions of professional people, he reminds us of a certain material dependence of the community upon the manual worker which is rightly achieving more and more recognition today. At the same time, surely, even from the stark economic point of view, the factors of management, enterprise and professional activity are just as essential to efficient production and harder to come by, and any individual professional man, provided he pulls his weight, is therefore entitled to a higher reward—and pension— than the average manual worker.
The real danger to the community of the comparatively straitened circumstances of the middle classes today is that they are apt to be so taken up with their own domestic problems that they have no leisure to give the voluntary service that they used to give in many directions. It has been the function of the middle classes to act as a leaven in British society, introducing out of the overflow of the full education they have received a higher standard of culture, ethics and religion than dui which would have otherwise obtained. This, they were taught at school, was their duty. On the whole they have fulfilled it welt; they have behaved as responsible people.
The middle classes are not a closed body; their composition is for ever changing. It is right that anyone who is capable of being educated to this status, and willing to undertake the responsibilities that gowith it, should have the opportunity. But, meanwhile, any measure which tends to prevent these classes from performing their creative social function is drastically weakening our national stability and so our effectiveness among the nations of the world.—Yours faithfully, Field House, Headington Hill, Oxford. R. S. JENKINSON.
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