Now there is nothing whatever wrong about being a Dean; nor is there anything wrong about being gloomy.  The only question is what dark but sincere motives have made you gloomy.  What dark but sincere motives have made you a Dean.  Now the address of Dr. Inge which gained him this erroneous title was mostly concerned with a defence of the modern capitalists against the modern strikers, from whose protest he appeared to anticipate appalling results.  Now if we look at the facts about that gentleman’s depression and also about his Deanery, we shall find a very curious state of things.

When Dr. Inge was called “the Gloomy Dean” a great injustice was done him.  He had appeared as the champion of our capitalist community against the forces of revolt; and any one who does that exceeds in optimism rather than pessimism.  A man who really thinks that strikers have suffered no wrong, or that employers have done no wrong—­such a man is not a Gloomy Dean, but a quite wildly and dangerously happy Dean.  A man who can feel satisfied with modern industrialism must be a man with a mysterious fountain of high spirits.  And the actual occasion is not less curious; because, as far as I can make out, his title to gloom reposes on his having said that our worker’s demand high wages, while the placid people of the Far East will quite cheerfully work for less.

This is true enough, of course, and there does not seem to be much difficulty about the matter.  Men of the Far East will submit to very low wages for the same reason that they will submit to “the punishment known as Li, or Slicing”; for the same reason that they will praise polygamy and suicide; for the same reason that they subject the wife utterly to the husband or his parents; for the same reason that they serve their temples with prostitutes for priests; for the same reason that they sometimes seem to make no distinction between sexual passion and sexual perversion.  They do it, that is, because they are Heathens; men with traditions different from ours about the limits of endurance and the gestures of self-respect.  They may be very much better than we are in hundreds of other ways; and I can quite understand a man (though hardly a Dean) really preferring their historic virtues to those of Christendom.  A man may perhaps feel more comfortable among his Asiatic coolies than among his European comrades:  and as we are to allow the Broadest Thought in the Church, Dr. Inge has as much right to his heresy as anybody else.  It is true that, as Dr. Inge says, there are numberless Orientals who will do a great deal of work for very little money; and it is most undoubtedly true that there are several high-placed and prosperous Europeans who like to get work done and pay as little as possible for it.