was probably under the same impulse
towards a mysterious misfit of names that people denounced Dr. Inge as
"the Gloomy Dean."

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 Asiat