Title: The Harvest of Ruskin
Author: Graham, John W.
Language: English
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THE HARVEST
OF RUSKIN



THE HARVEST
OF RUSKIN

BY

JOHN W. GRAHAM, M.A.

PRINCIPAL OF DALTON HALL, UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER
AUTHOR OF “THE DESTRUCTION OF DAYLIGHT”

[Illustration: colophon]

LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD.
RUSKIN HOUSE, 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C. 1

_First published in 1920_

(_All rights reserved_)



PREFACE


This book is concerned with Ruskin’s teaching in the departments of
Religion and Economics only, including his social reforms and
educational schemes. It leaves out all his work on Art and in Natural
History and Mineralogy. His thoughts on Beauty in Landscape are treated
only so far as that Beauty is damaged by Industrialism or by War. Nor
has any attempt been made to produce an analysis of his literary style
or styles. The long extracts which the plan of the book requires,
however, afford sufficient examples of his artistry in words.

My aim is to give a critical estimate in a reverent spirit of Ruskin’s
teaching in these two departments, and to apply it to the needs of our
own time.

The development of Ruskin’s religious faith and its final outcome have
not, I believe, been fully worked out before, and the reconciliation
which I have attempted in the region of Economics is long overdue. These
parts of the book have been delivered as lectures in past years under
the Manchester and Liverpool University Extension Committees, at Summer
Schools, and elsewhere.

I am indebted to Ruskin’s literary executors for permission to quote
freely from his works.

J. W. G.

DALTON HALL,
MANCHESTER.



CONTENTS


CHAPTER	                                                            PAGE

I. THE SIGNS OF A PROPHET                                              9

II. THE PILGRIM’S WAY                                                 26

III. TO WHAT FOLD?                                                    55

IV. RUSKIN AND MILL: A RECONCILIATION                                 78

V. RUSKIN’S RECONSTRUCTION                                           120

VI. RUSKIN’S ECONOMICS TO-DAY                                        151

VII. USURY                                                           185

VIII. WAR                                                            203

IX. MACHINERY                                                        222

EPILOGUE                                                             259

INDEX                                                                267



The Harvest of Ruskin



_CHAPTER I_

_THE SIGNS OF A PROPHET_


Now that one hundred years have gone by since their one precious boy was
born in London to a Scottish wine merchant and his wife, it may be well
to ask how much of Ruskin’s teaching has proved to be chaff which the
wind driveth away, and how much has been precious seed. Ruskin is just
now suffering from the time of comparative neglect which intervenes
between an author’s contemporaries and posterity, the years when the
immediate appropriateness of his message may have lapsed, when it is no
longer fresh and startling, but its permanent value has not yet been
settled by the verdict of several generations. All or nearly all the
great Victorians are in like case.

Ruskin’s art criticism is, as a matter of fact, not only ignored but
resolutely rejected nowadays among critical writers. He loved beauty
and charm in subject; he rejected scenes of horror and torture, and also
subjects of mere Dutch commonplace. He loved delicate and accurately
minute drawing, and the realistic detail of the Preraphælites. He
desired that a tree in a picture should be recognized as an oak or a
birch; and he loved above all fine drawing of mosses, leaves, and
peacocks’ wings. This is the day of impressionism, super-impressionism
and impression of impressionism, and so on, through ever greater
abandonment of drawing and significance, to cubism, futurism and other
weird follies. I am not wishful to dogmatize on these matters; I incline
to the sage and wonderful conclusion that all styles are good provided
they are good styles; that conscientiousness in the portrayal of what
the artist really sees will not lead him astray; that originality, or at
any rate a marked individual gift, is a necessity; and that there is no
one orthodox school. As in everything else, the letter killeth,
convention blocks progress, and slovenliness includes a multitude of
sins.

But this book is not concerned with art criticism, but with the teaching
about human duty and happiness, to which Ruskin’s art interests led
him. The characteristic note he contributed to art criticism was to
regard art as a revelation of God and of Man. He was a prophet of Beauty
from his birth. Concerning his susceptibility in childhood to the power
of natural Beauty, he writes in the third volume of _Modern
Painters_,[1] in words which throw light upon his special gifts of
temperament: “Although there was no definite religious sentiment mingled
with it, there was a continual perception of sanctity in the whole of
Nature, from the slightest thing to the vastest; an instinctive awe,
mixed with delight; an indefinable thrill, such as we sometimes imagine
to indicate the presence of a disembodied spirit. I could only feel this
perfectly when I was alone; and then it would often make me shiver from
head to foot from the joy and fear of it, when, after being some time
away from the hills, I first got to the shore of a mountain river, where
the brown water circled among the pebbles, or when I first saw the swell
of distant land against the sunset, or the first low broken wall covered
with mountain moss. I cannot in the least describe the feeling; but I do
not think this is my fault, nor that of the English language, for I am
afraid no feeling is describable. If we had to explain even the sense of
bodily hunger to a person who had never felt it, we should be hard put
to it for words; and the joy in nature seemed to me to come of a sort of
heart-hunger, satisfied with the presence of a Great and Holy Spirit.
These feelings remained in their full intensity till I was eighteen or
twenty, and then, as the reflective and practical power increased, and
the ‘cares of the world’ gained upon me, faded gradually away, in the
manner described by Wordsworth in his _Intimations of Immortality_.”

The fact is that we are dealing with a man who belongs to the prophetic
order: and this book is written in the belief that he was not only a
prophet for the nineteenth, but also for the twentieth century. He has
all the prophetic signs. Right or wrong, fantastic or terribly truthful,
we feel that he is coining his soul into golden words. The stress and
strain of his cry against priesthoods, modern business, false teaching
of economics as he thought it, wore him out, and left him subject to
attacks of inflammation of the brain. Rightly he spoke of _Fors
Clavigera_ as the book of his life; “best worth calling a book,” he
said, of anything he had written. With it his serious work ended in
1884. Only the chatty reminiscences of _Præterita_ were to be written
after that.

He had, besides a dreadful sincerity, another mark of the true afflatus.
Never, as he pleaded, had he written a line for money or for the glory
of self. It was the wrong done to Turner that drove him to write _Modern
Painters_; the necessity of character in a nation was the lesson he had
to teach in tracing the history of Venice in her monuments; the cry of
the poor, and indignation over the wrecking of humanity in the name of
business, drove him to write _Unto This Last_, and all his social and
economic works. He had the single-mindedness of the seer.

Again, he inspired love and discipleship in hearts ready for his
message, as prophets do. The Master he was called, and the Master he
remains. His loss was a personal loss. The event of January 20, 1900,
was to many of us a real bereavement. The strong personal note which
caused the prophets Isaiah and Hosea to do in their own persons
emblematic acts for a sign, caused Ruskin also to tell his readers more
about himself than anyone would who did not identify himself with his
message. To the unseeing eye this looks like egotism, but it is far
from that.

His life, too, was such as a prophet’s ought to be. He gave away the
greater part of a fortune of £157,000, and some house property, and
chose to do without advertising his books. In love and in the loss of
love he suffered, but did nothing base, everything that was kind and
true. As a prophet whose burden was wealth and poverty, social tyranny
and human wreckage, he was able to speak as a rich man to members of his
own class. A poor man who prophesies on this subject is apt to be
discounted by blunt humanity, who think that he may be merely an envious
grumbler.

And, once again, he has that characteristic of the messengers of the
Truth, that their message is too new and strange to be acceptable at
once to their contemporaries. They are accepted by the few: the world
smiles or curses and passes by, but gradually it bends round in one of
its great curves, and round its spiral path revolves as it approaches
the centre of attraction. I shall try to show that much of Ruskin’s
social and economic teaching is just such a centre of our constant
approximation, though we are apparently always going nearly at right
angles to it.

Here, then, we have every sign of the prophetic character: fidelity to
the deepest motives of the soul, an inevitable and generally unconscious
selflessness, the loyalty of his followers, his frank openness to the
world, his consecrated life and holy sorrow, the antagonisms he evoked
and the contempt of the proud, and the clear influence he is
exerting--these, all together, are prophetic.

Let us examine his outward qualifications. Ruskin’s judgment was at
times erratic; his playfulness and his petulance prevent our taking
everything he said with prosaic seriousness; he was not always able to
speak in measured tones of sober exactness, but gave way to
exaggeration. But his intellectual equipment was of the best. He was
heir both to Greece and to Judæa. The Bible was his text-book and Plato
was his political teacher. All culture was at his command. Oxford,
Geneva, Rome, Venice, the Alps, the Apennines and the Lake of Coniston
had yielded up their best to him. He prophesied from no street
corner--from the Sheldonian Theatre in the University of Oxford his
message was uttered.

So much for the signs and for the outward qualifications of the seer.
The prophet’s fire is recognizably there. The tabernacle of God is with
men, as of old; and if He is to speak with a clear Word to our hasting
age, to preach righteousness, purity, work to the idle and rest to the
weary, clean cities, and clean hearts, how else would He preach than
with the text of Ruskin: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they
grow; they toil not, neither do they spin; and yet I say unto you that
your millionaires in all their glory of machines cannot supply to us the
loss of these.”

At the age of forty-one, about the time when the mind reaches maturity,
begin the social teachings of John Ruskin in full completeness--not to
be much changed, except in one particular, for the quarter of a century
of writing that was left him. The live coal from off the altar came to
him as he was wandering in restless suffering among the valleys of
Savoy, and his first “Thus saith the Lord” was written at Chamonix. Not
that all this came at once. The growth can be traced; but before 1860 he
was chiefly an art critic, and in that year the last volume of _Modern
Painters_ appeared.

Let us look at the advantages of the delay. They were manifold. A man
should do something else besides prophesy. He should win his position,
take his rank among men, in some walk of life, before he is quite
qualified to tell others how to order their steps. He has a degree to
take in something besides homiletics. It was from the pulpit of a great
literary reputation that the author of _Modern Painters_ opened his
mouth to preach. That reputation he was content utterly to throw away;
to tread on it, step upon it as upon a ladder, that from the top of it
he might be heard when he spoke the words the Spirit taught him. That
was the great renunciation of his literary life. What a refusal of a
call it would have been had he hugged his reputation, been careful of
his influence, that last temptation of noble minds. It is politicians
who do that, not prophets. But these know the glorious liberty into
which they come.

No doubt any other professional career would have ended with a message.
What an explosion might have occurred in the Church had his mother’s
wish been fulfilled, and he become a clergyman, with a Bishop to look
after him. As it was, his father’s art tastes and preoccupation with
pictures and with picturesque scenery, and the boy’s own early skill
both as writer and draughtsman, led him, after an attempt at poetry, to
become by profession a writer on Art. There he had the opportunity of
elaborating his mighty implement, that superb, facile, plastic
instrument of music and voice of thunder, his inimitable style. It is
that which ensures the preservation of his work. Noble style is the
antiseptic which preserves from decay the written words of men. Books
without style are not read long.

In classifying the books in our libraries, under what head shall we
place the seventy volumes of John Ruskin? There is much temptation to
fall back helplessly upon the heading “Miscellaneous”; for he wrote on
Art, including Sculpture, Engraving, Architecture and Heraldry; on
Economics, History and constructive Politics; on Botany, Meteorology,
Ornithology, Geology, and Mineralogy; he wrote Guide-books, Poems,
Autobiography, Literary Criticism; he treated Theology, Ethics,
Education, Music and Mythology; he brought out regularly for seven years
a monthly periodical _de omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis_; he edited
Biography, German stories and translations from the Greek and the
Italian: he wrote Dialogue and Fairy Tale.

Where shall we seek for unity in this manifold outpouring of a versatile
genius, who touched none of these subjects without irradiating it? In
that fact lies our key. With what did he irradiate this comprehensive
list of human interests? The answer cannot be doubtful in the mind of
any careful student. He told us how it seemed to him that all these
things looked to the eye of God. He tried to solve all questions by the
flashlight of the Eternal. He worked at agate and crystal that it might
reveal the beauty of the Lord; he fought his social crusade for the sake
of the dim disinherited multitude who had no eyes for the Divine
loveliness, and no glory to behold: and for the sake of justice and of
love which wealth and luxury denied. He was a messenger of the Most High
to modern needs; and his eager soul found a service throughout this wide
range of science and art.

Not one of his writings is called a sermon, yet we have found his class,
for he belongs to the class of Divines, ordained in a temple more
Metropolitan and more Catholic than Canterbury or Rome, and not made
with hands. Through nearly half a century of active authorship he
consecrated his every gift to the service of men. He never looked back
in any unfaithfulness that we know of. I wish first to make clear that
all his life the gates between the soul and the Divine Source were open:
that he was truly a religious man under every form of faith and doubt;
and that no one need hesitate about this at any tight place in his
career. Keep this as a sure clue, and we shall fearlessly follow his
story.

The childish sensibility to landscape beauty I take to be an early
manifestation of the gift of the seer, a significant token of native
nearness to the Unseen. For many years he never climbed a mountain,
alone, without instinctively dropping on his knees on the summit, in
thankful reverence. As the careless foot of an engrossing industrialism
stamped into ashes more and more of the land whose fairness had been his
life’s passion, it seemed to him to be indeed sacrilege and desecration,
a reckless destruction of Divine things. Art he only valued as a form of
expression, a language whose subject was Nature and Man. In the latter
half of his life more emphatically, but more or less from the beginning,
he regarded Man as the object for whose welfare Nature, in the landscape
sense, existed; and he rested not till he had brought Man into due
relation with God, up to whom in the end came all things.

He was devout by training. Morning and evening he read his chapter out
of the Bible; and the fourteenth century manuscript he used in later
years occupied a prominent and handy place in the study at Brantwood. In
Swiss and Italian villages in his early journeys he read the service
through on Sunday to his servant, when there was no Protestant Church.
From the Biblical references in the indexes to his works, you would
suppose they were a theological library. In his Oxford Lectures Art was
the illustration, but conduct the theme, and Art was chosen as an
illustration because in it the artist shows what manner of Man he is, in
a way that cannot be dissembled.

What are the qualifications which fit a man to be a religious
researcher, a mountain-top gazer into heaven?

He must know from his own experience the meaning of holiness, thereby
gaining a practical knowledge of God. He must, in Pauline words, be
crucified with Christ, though he may not care for such an expression; he
must preach not himself and please not himself. Such a man John Ruskin
was. Among the many wayward and impulsive men who have been “dear to
the Muses and to the nymphs not unbeloved,” not all like him have been
also masters of themselves, and kept on their foreheads the white stone,
with the new name written. Ruskin was himself noble and sweet in his
life, a man of sorrows, well acquainted with grief endured in silence,
with nothing ignoble in his eighty years of generous charity and lonely
service. He had passed, too, through that experience which seems
essential to the wielding of spiritual power. He had had his great
renunciation, he had heard some hard call, and had obeyed. The prophets
have all gone on the Via Crucis: they have all lost their lives that
they might find them. As Whittier abandoned a hopeful political career
and remained poor till he was sixty that he might help to free the
slave, and gained his spiritual power thereby, so Ruskin in 1860 went
boldly out to do battle with the Society that loved and honoured him.

Further, such a man must greatly dare. He must face the demon of the
study first; then, too probably, the resentment of organized religion.
One cannot succeed as a researcher without discovering something new;
and that is bound to modify or overthrow something old and established.

Nor can such a man usually present a heart of iron and a front of brass
to the darts of controversy. He must be a sensitive man, by the very
nature of his research. He may or may not be privileged to feel strong
in the strength of his cause; but even if he does the shrinking of the
nerves remains. This daring and suffering were pre-eminently the lot of
Ruskin; and it was this which finally broke down his mind. “He was
beside himself for others’ sakes.” It was the neglect with which the St.
George’s Guild and allied reform work were treated by those who were
otherwise his friends, which contributed to drive him into inflammation
of the brain in 1878, and again several times afterwards. “Wounded in
the house of my friends.”

Besides these essential qualifications Ruskin had his very unusual
gifts, which it may be long before we find again combined with the
religious faculty--his long lifetime free from the need of earning
money, his early popularity, his wonderful style, the vantage ground of
his Professorial chair, his penetrating mind, his wit and his fire. It
may be long before we see his like again.

I am far from claiming infallibility for Ruskin. Infallibility is an
out-of-date conception altogether. There is no such thing on earth. To
be infallible you must know everything; you must be infinite. The
infallibility of a finite creature is an inhuman, even an inorganic
conception. Organic life means growth, and growth means imperfection;
but growth is Nature’s way of making things. Infallibility is a tyrant
born of ecclesiasticism, and bred on human laziness and fear. It has
become the attribute of the quack pill, and there let it abide.

But, beyond this safe generality, Ruskin had human weaknesses of an
obvious kind. He loved paradox; he played with his thunderbolts a
little, and rather liked to shock people. He was a humorist as well as a
divine. It is difficult to put down some of his derivations to anything
but sheer fooling; a man who will put the English _Force_ and Latin
_Fors_ down to the same root, will do anything in that line. Again, when
he was in thunderous action he allowed volcanoes of vituperation to
erupt, which one would have wished otherwise. He sadly lacked restraint,
but, like the strong language of the old Prophets, his had its root in
love of man.

We know more of his intimacies and his foibles, which he loves
humorously to exaggerate, than are generally given to the public. He has
taken means to prevent any artificial pedestal, in idealized aloofness,
ever being raised to him. His utter frankness led him to give the public
his private accounts, which people generally keep to themselves; and
such correspondence as that painful one with Octavia Hill.[2] But when
the faults of others were in question he was silent as the grave, to his
own hurt. He was “kind even to the unthankful and the evil.” As for many
of us, how much more vulgar and base would the world have been without
that noble and lovely soul. Many are those who owe him an irredeemable
debt. His life was not, as he sadly thought, the story of baffled
strife. Of him, as of Dr. Arnold, it could be said that not alone was he
saved.[3]



_CHAPTER II_

_THE PILGRIM’S WAY_


Having now stated our conviction that Ruskin was always essentially
religious, we will trace the history of his beliefs.

He began life in 1819, under the strong influence of his mother, as a
Calvinistic Protestant, of the narrow type then current. The Ruskins
were properly Scottish Presbyterians, living in London. A Low Church or
Spurgeon’s Tabernacle was equally acceptable. His mother made him read
with her daily portions of the Bible, two or three chapters, undiluted
and unselected. They accomplished the journey from Genesis to Revelation
in about a year, and then began at Genesis again next day, “hard names,
numbers, Levitical Law and all.” They went through it at least six times
together.

She also taught him, “complete and sure,” twenty-six chapters of the
Bible, including the 119th Psalm, and all the Scottish Paraphrases of
the Psalms.[4]

This did not make him vitally religious; he was not “converted.” The
Bible was, for the present, a rather tiresome task, and to chapel he and
his father went submissively, feeling their sad inferiority to the
mother in these matters. His mother’s creed he dutifully imbibed,
without question or strong feeling of any kind. He had the proper
antipathy to Rome, and the habit of outward prayer.[5] His real religion
was born at Friar’s Crag, Derwentwater, at four years old, when he
looked with awe into the dark lake over the mossy tree roots, and felt
himself in the Presence.

He was, as an only child, a protected treasure, the pride of and a great
responsibility to his wealthy parents. He never went to a Public School,
and when he went to Oxford to be made into a Bishop his parents came
with him, lived in the High, and his mother saw him every day. With
them, far into mid-life, he went on all his foreign journeys but two,
those of 1845 and 1858. The parental ideas remained potent with him to
an extent hardly realizable by this generation, which often finds it so
difficult to bring their parents up properly.

His earlier works are written with the questionless devoutness of the
untried mind. They were narrow in theology, fiercely Protestant, earnest
enough; and on their positive side, still sound and valuable. The first
two volumes of _Modern Painters_, the whole of the _Stones of Venice_
and the _Seven Lamps of Architecture_, and the Edinburgh _Lectures on
Architecture and Painting_ belong to this period. So, broadly, do the
Manchester Lectures on the _Political Economy of Art_ in 1857; but they
are the herald of the next epoch.

He resisted the new Geology of Lyell, declared indignantly that God had
created the Alpine valleys, and put the rivers to flow along them,
denying that the rivers had worn their own valleys out. Somewhere in the
later fifties we find him scandalized by the statement of Frederick
Denison Maurice that Jael’s treacherous murder of Sisera was a wicked
deed. The fact that Deborah the Prophetess sang a sacred song over it
was enough to justify it to Ruskin, then over thirty-five.[6]

Just before this incident, however, his moral sense was beginning to
revolt from certain parts of his creed. He was, he says, invited to a
“fashionable séance of Evangelical doctrine, at the Earl of Ducie’s,
presided over by Mr. Molyneux, then a divine of celebrity in that sect,
who sat with one leg over his other knee, in the attitude always given
to Herod at the Massacre of the Innocents in mediæval sculpture, and
discoursed in tones of consummate assurance and satisfaction, and to the
entire comfort and consent of his Belgravian audience, on the beautiful
parable of the Prodigal Son. Which, or how many, of his hearers he meant
to describe as having personally lived on husks, and devoured their
father’s property, did not of course appear; but that something of the
sort was necessary to the completeness of the joy in heaven over them,
now in Belgrave Square, at the feet, or one foot, of Mr. Molyneux, could
not be questioned. Waiting my time, till the raptures of the converted
company had begun to flag a little, I ventured, from a back seat, to
enquire of Mr. Molyneux what we were to learn from the example of the
other son, not prodigal, who was, his father said, ‘ever with me and all
that I have, thine.’ A sudden horror and unanimous feeling of the
serpent having somehow got over the wall into their Garden of Eden,
fell on the whole company; and some of them, I thought, looked at the
candles, as if they expected them to burn blue. After a pause of a
minute, gathering himself into an expression of pity and indulgence,
withholding latent thunder, Mr. Molyneux explained to me that the
home-staying son was merely a picturesque figure introduced to fill
the background of the parable agreeably, and contained no instruction
or example for the well-disposed scriptural student, but on the
contrary, rather, a snare for the unwary, and a temptation to
self-righteousness--which was, of all sins, the most offensive to God.
Under the fulmination of which answer, I retired from the séance in
silence, nor ever attended another of the kind from that day to
this.”[7]

It was just this lack of feeling for righteousness as such, the idea
that you needed first to be a “most sinful sinner” if you wished to
become a “most Christian Christian,” and a want of recognition that
forgiveness was a spiritual and inward process, which caused the
contemptuous references to his early form of doctrine which are
scattered thickly throughout Ruskin’s later writings.

The experiences which make epochs in men’s lives are indeed strangely
various and unexpected. Three events stand out as the destroyers of his
Protestantism and of much of his outward edifice of faith. Their year
was 1858. One was the discovery that the Puritan Sabbath of his youth
had no Scriptural authority, but based itself, without confessing it, on
the Jewish Sabbath Day, by erroneous interpretation. “If they have
deceived me in this, they have deceived me in everything,” he said. His
faith in his mother’s religious guides was gone.[8] In 1858 for the
first time he broke the Sabbath by drawing some flowers on Sunday. That
act, in him, stood for emancipation.[9] He had been finding that
Catholic Psalters were lovely things, that Catholic peasants in Tuscany
led sweet and patient lives, and that “Presbyterian prayers against time
by people who never expected to be any the better for them, were
unlovely and wrong.”[10] The same year he turned in at Turin to hear a
Waldensian pastor. This was the second event. “To an audience of about
seventeen gray-haired women and a few men, the preacher, a somewhat
stunted figure with a cracked voice, put his utmost zeal into a
consolatory discourse on the wickedness of the wide world, more
especially of the plain of Piedmont and the city of Turin, and on the
exclusive favour with God enjoyed by the between nineteen and
twenty-four elect members of his congregation, in the streets of Admah
and Zeboim.” “Myself neither cheered nor greatly alarmed by this
doctrine, I walked back into the condemned city, and up into the gallery
where Paul Veronese’s ‘Solomon and the Queen of Sheba’ glowed in full
afternoon light.” And in that hour’s meditation his “evangelical beliefs
were put away, to be debated of no more.”[11]

But the solvent influences did not stop there. They seldom fail to
proceed. Rebuilding rather than repair is generally necessary to a
broken down system of thought. But that which left him in great darkness
was an experience which could have so affected no one but Ruskin. This
was the third event. It was the discovery at Venice that the best work
was done by irreligious painters. He found that “Tintoret only
occasionally forgot himself into religion,” and that Titian had no
religion at all, and yet had to be given as the standard of perfection
in painting. Ruskin concluded, first, and quite truly, that “human work
must be done honourably and thoroughly, because we are now men; whether
we expect to be angels, or ever were slugs, being practically no matter.
That by the work we have done and not by our belief we shall be
judged.”[12] He went on, by generalizing, to a further conclusion in
that year, afterwards to be corrected. The conclusion and the correction
divide the periods of Ruskin’s life. He concluded that the group of
great worldly painters of various nations, Turner, Titian, Velasquez,
Sir Joshua, Gainsborough, Tintoret, and Paul Veronese, did more perfect
and stronger work than the sacred army of obedient Catholics headed by
Cimabue, Giotto and Angelico, who worked under the guidance of a
heavenly vision.

This seems a strange reason for losing faith. It can only be understood
when we remember that Ruskin regarded art as the expression of the
painter’s whole nature, especially the soul of him; and if the endowment
from heaven were really potent, it should inspire the artist to do work
that is clearly supreme. That it did not do so was Ruskin’s
stumbling-block. I will not anticipate the ultimate solution; but only
pause to mourn over the many stumbling-blocks which our theories put in
our way. Because the lot decided unfairly, Silas Marner, the wronged of
heaven, lost his faith. How many have been and are unable to see through
pain and poverty to God. How many have bound their faith to the accuracy
of a record or the fidelity of a frail fellow-creature.

Of the religious utterances of this first period, which ended in 1858,
the second volume of _Modern Painters_ is the most typical. To me, it
was the door by which in 1882 I entered into my love of Ruskin the
author, as _Fors_ led me to love and reverence the man. The subject is
an analysis of Beauty as a various expression of the mind of God. It is
published separately; it is not a long book; and it might be read for a
second time along with the Author’s notes of 1883. These give us the
verdict of age upon the enthusiasm of its own youth, and are vastly
entertaining. Even as Tennyson, in his “Locksley Hall Sixty Years
After,” puts his quietus upon the ebullitions of the most rhythmic and
moving utterance of his youth, so does Ruskin, with mocking self-blame,
speak with fatherly candour to the Oxford Graduate of 1845.

To this period, too, belongs his avowedly theological pamphlet, _Notes
on the Construction of Sheepfolds_. It is of 1851, attacks
ecclesiastical pretensions on Scriptural grounds, and in spite of its
sectarian limitations was considered so sound in its main drift that the
author reissued it in his mature period.

He states that all his works up to 1853 are marred by his narrow
Protestant dogmatism. Now 1858, as we have seen, was his year of freedom
from it, and from much that was more precious. Between 1853 and 1858
came out volumes iii and iv of _Modern Painters_, the _Lectures on
Architecture and Painting_ at Edinburgh, and the lectures at Manchester
on the _Political Economy of Art_. The last marks transition. It is the
forerunner of the next period; it shows us how his way of treating Art
led him on to Economics. But it is of great interest to study his
position in these two volumes of _Modern Painters_. They are as
religious as ever, and as devout; but between Catholic and Protestant,
frequently brought into contrast, they hold the scales of judgment. The
author casts the lantern of criticism impartially upon both, but his
own faith in the great verities still holds. It is plain, however, that
conduct was rising to the chief place in his mind. The Sermon on the
Mount was becoming, what it ever afterwards remained to him, the central
teaching of the Christian faith.

If we omit the Poems of his boyhood and youth, and his early minor
scientific contributions to journals, and begin his career as a writer
for the public with the year 1842, when he wrote the first volume of
_Modern Painters_, published next year, we have sixteen years of
authorship for the Early Period. We have also, oddly enough, sixteen
years of authorship, 1858 to 1874, for his Middle Period, shortly to be
described; and if we give sixteen years for the mature period also, that
brings us to 1890, only a few months after the last number of
_Præterita_ struggled into the light from his failing pen. He wrote no
more. We thus have three periods, Early, Middle, and Mature, each of
sixteen years, not difficult to remember, 1842-1858, 1858-1874, and
1874-1890. It is a testimony to his utter frankness and undimmed candour
that we are able thus to map out the growth of his convictions.

For a growth it was, all the time, though apparently 1858 was a year of
wreck and ruin. We cannot put new wine into old wineskins. His middle
period was the time for the analytical tendency of his mind to have its
way. Mazzini had already said that Ruskin had the most analytic mind in
Europe; and now that searching analysis which had discovered Luini and
placed Tintoretto, and had penetrated, by a way of its own, far into the
hidden secret of Beauty, could not be denied when it faced the
stronghold of the Christian revelation, even though his own heart and
every fibre of his sensitive nature was within the fortress attacked.

His economic crusade began in 1860; and on his spiritually desolated
heart was piled the sorrow of the social system. Hermit and heretic he
became, in religion and economics alike. Victorious in his championship
of Turner and the Pre-raphaelites, whom single-handed he had placed on
the pinnacle they have never lost, he had the literary and artistic
world at his feet. This great position he cast aside to enter on a
sterner battle. The recognized leader of taste, the arbiter of
reputations, turned aside to abuse so good a man as John Stuart Mill, to
say the most shocking things about the clergy and the clergy’s wives,
to testify against rent and interest, to blaspheme that steam power by
which England was conquering the world, and to utter strange hesitating
sayings which showed that he was not sure of a life to come. Nor could
he brave the storm with the self-confident dogmatism of youth. “I seldom
now feel sure of anything,” he wrote in the first Christmas issue of
_Fors_, “still seldomer, however, do I feel sure of the contrary of
anything.”[13] When we add that this period was marked by the loss of
his parents, who had been everything to him, and by a grievous
disappointment in love--for the girl who loved him would not marry him
because he was not orthodox, so far as reasons can ever be given for
such decisions, but died of a decline instead--we shall see how heavy
was the lonely task set before him to do. Nor had the veneration of
disciples and the growing recognition of all good men come to him yet;
it came afterwards, built the prophet’s shrine, in his lifetime
certainly,[14] but only after the world’s neglect, and his failure even
to carry his own friends with him, had helped to break the powers of
his mind and set his brain reeling in recurring attacks of delirious
inflammation. He was, in that madness, being offered upon the sacrifice
and service of our faith.

During this middle period of prime mental power, he wrote nineteen
volumes, and numerous catalogues and pamphlets. They are, in order of
time: _The Two Paths_, _Modern Painters_, vol. v., _Unto This Last_,
_Munera Pulveris_, _Sesame and Lilies_, _The Ethics of the Dust_, _The
Crown of Wild Olive_, _Time and Tide_, _The Queen of the Air_, _Lectures
on Art at Oxford_, the first half of _Flors Clavigera_, _Aratra
Pentelici_, _The Eagle’s Nest_, _Love’s Meinie_, _Ariadne Florentina_,
_Val D’Arno_, and most of the papers reprinted in _On the Old Road_. As
an author he was in his full strength.

The significance of the period is that under the most painful
uncertainties of doctrine, true religion shone still, blazed beaconlike,
in fact: blazed as a beacon blazes when blown by tempest. But few
readers ever thought of the writer as a heretic. He preached all the
time the simple eternal sanction for right conduct which the nature of
man, akin to the Divine, provides. He recognized the ineradicable claim
which the teaching of the New Testament has upon our obedience. He
attacked the Churches, not for being too Christian, but for not being
anything like Christian enough. Referring to his mother’s gift of
twenty-six chapters learnt by heart, he says in 1874:--

“The chapters became, indeed, strictly conclusive and protective to me
in all modes of thought; and the body of divinity they contain,
acceptable through all fear or doubt; nor, through any fear or doubt or
fault have I ever lost my loyalty to them, nor betrayed the first
command in the one I was made to repeat oftenest: ‘Let not Mercy and
Truth forsake thee.’ And at my present age of fifty-five, in spite of
some enlarged observations of what modern philosophers call the Reign of
Law, I perceive more distinctly than ever the Reign of a Spirit of Mercy
and Truth--infinite in pardon and purification for its wandering and
faultful children, who have yet Love in their hearts; and altogether
adverse and implacable to its perverse and lying enemies, who have
resolute hatred in their hearts, and resolute falsehood on their
lips.”[15]

The classical passage, as I should esteem it, for this period is in
_The Eagle’s Nest_,[16] the Oxford Lectures of 1872; which contain some
of his most careful religious writing:

“All of you who have ever read your Gospels carefully must have wondered
sometimes, what could be the meaning of those words, ‘If any speak
against the Son of Man it shall be forgiven; but if against the Holy
Spirit it shall not be forgiven, neither in this world nor in the next.’
The passage may have many meanings which I do not know; but one meaning
I know positively, and I tell you so just as frankly as I would that I
knew the meaning of a verse in Homer. Those of you who still go to
Chapel say every day your creed; and, I suppose, too often, less and
less every day believing it. Now, you may cease to believe two articles
of it, and--admitting Christianity to be true--still be forgiven. But I
can tell you, you must not cease to believe the third!

“You begin by saying that you believe in an Almighty Father. Well, you
may entirely lose the sense of that Fatherhood and yet be forgiven.

“You go on to say that you believe in a Saviour Son. You may entirely
lose the sense of that Sonship and yet be forgiven.

“But the third article--disbelieve if you dare! ‘I believe in the Holy
Ghost, the Lord and Giver of Life.’ Disbelieve that! and your own being
is degraded into the state of dust driven by the wind; and the elements
of dissolution have entered your very heart and soul.

“All Nature, with one voice--with one glory--is set to teach you
reverence for the life communicated to you from the Father of Spirits.
The song of birds, and their plumage, the scent of flowers, their
colour, their very existence, are in direct connection with the mystery
of that communicated life: and all the strength, and all the arts of
men, are measured by and founded upon their reverence for the passion,
and their guardianship of the purity, of Love.”

Such is the utmost asceticism of the soul; the most careful and
determined assimilation of the least quantity of the bread of life. We
may sum his creed in the words: Happy are the pure in heart, for they
yet in their flesh shall see the light of Heaven and know the will of
God.

Perhaps the question of Divine Personality may be felt even in our most
audacious moments to be beyond our analysis. I do not count the word
Personality a very helpful one, one way or the other. It is clearly on
the human plane, must be imperfect, and may seriously limit our thought
of God. Tennyson’s favourite prayer was “O Thou Infinite, Amen.” And
with this much of personal address or aspiration our souls may surely
rest. Take this as a satisfying account of the Creative Logos of the
Greeks, written in the light of evolution, in 1869 (_Queen of the Air_,
pp. 124-6):

“With respect to all these divisions and powers of plants--it does not
matter in the least by what concurrences of circumstance or necessity
they may gradually have been developed: the concurrence of circumstance
is itself the supreme and inexplicable fact. We always come at last to a
formative cause, which directs the circumstance, and mode of meeting it.
If you ask an ordinary botanist the reason of the form of a leaf, he
will tell you it is ‘a developed tubercle,’ and that ‘its ultimate form
is owing to the directions of its vascular threads.’ But what directs
its vascular threads? ‘They are seeking for something they want’ he will
probably answer. What makes them want that? What made them seek for it
thus? Seek for it, in five fibres or in three? Seek for it, in
serration, or in sweeping curves? Seek for it, in servile tendrils, or
impetuous spray? Seek for it, in woollen wrinkles rough with stings, or
in glossy surfaces, green with pure strength, and winterless delight?

“There is no answer. But, the sum of all is, that over the entire
surface of the earth and its waters, as influenced by the power of the
air under solar light, there is developed a series of changing forms, in
clouds, plants and animals, all of which have reference in their action
or nature, to the human intelligence that perceives them; and on which,
in their aspects of horror and beauty, and their qualities of good and
evil, there is engraved a series of myths or words of the forming power,
which, according to the true passion and energy of the human race, they
have been enabled to read into religion. And this forming power has been
by all nations partly confused with the breath of air through which it
acts, and partly understood as a creative wisdom, proceeding from the
Supreme Deity; but entering into and inspiring all intelligences that
work in harmony with Him. And whatever intellectual results may be in
modern days obtained by regarding this effluence only as a motion or
vibration, every formative human art hitherto, and the best states of
human happiness and order, have depended on the apprehension of its
mystery (which is certain), and of its personality (which is probable).”

He concludes that lecture, the second in _The Queen of the Air_, with
these words:

“This only we may discern assuredly; this, every true light of science,
every mercifully granted power, every wisely restricted thought, teach
us more clearly day by day, that in the heaven above, and the earth
beneath, there is one continual and omnipotent presence of help, and of
peace, for all men who know that they Live, and remember that they Die.”

To quote from the religious teaching of these fruitful years would be an
endless task; I must only refer, I fear, without quoting any of it, to
_The Mystery of Life and its Arts_, printed in the complete edition of
_Sesame and Lilies_; a characteristic and pathetic exhortation, and
chiefly perhaps, to §10-16 of the Introduction to _The Crown of Wild
Olive_.

So much for his constructive teaching. But he was a destroyer too. The
peculiarity of his position and the cause of his loneliness was that he
was always throwing his darts not only into the camp of the business men
and their allies the economists, but also into the two religious camps,
generally opposed to one another, held, one by the clergy, the other by
the materialistic men of science. He rebuked both parties for their
assumptions, and he smote them with all the artillery of sarcasm, wit
and indignation. “You have to guard against the fatalest darkness of the
two opposite Prides: the Pride of Faith, which imagines that the nature
of the Deity can be defined by its convictions; and the Pride of
Science, which imagines that the energy of Deity can be explained by its
analysis.”[17] As sword-play it is fine. He gives what purports to be a
scientific account of Shakespeare: so much water, so much carbo-hydrate
and phosphorus, and thus you build up your organism called William
Shakespeare--with, of course, something left out. He was ever dwelling
on the realities of the spirit which chemistry omits. The fashionable
scientific materialism of the seventies he utterly abhorred: he behaved
to it as St. George to the Dragon. He loathed anatomy, mocked at the
idea that you understood a creature by cutting up its remains; and when
the men of science at Oxford proceeded to vivisection he threw up his
professorship in flaming wrath, sick at heart; every sentiment of
mercy, every safe doctrine of science violated in unholy cruelty and
impatience.

He describes the limitations of “some scientific minds, which in their
judgment of the Universe can be compared to nothing so accurately as to
the woodworms in the panel of a picture by some great painter, if we may
conceive them as tasting with discrimination of the wood, and with
repugnance of the colour, and declaring that even this unlooked for and
undesirable combination is a normal result of the action of molecular
Forces.”[18]

We pass on to the third period of sixteen years, the Mature Period as I
call it, from 1874 to 1890, when his productive life ended. He now came
to know more fully the fullness of faith. Here he entered into his
reward, I say. The revelation of God to him became clearer, sweeter,
mightier. As in 1858, the time of crisis was marked by two events which
occurred that year, one in things spiritual and one in things
artistic.[19]

The artistic event of 1874 was a reversal of the puzzling judgment of
1858 to the effect that the worldly painters excelled the devout ones.
It came about through his copying one of Giotto’s frescoes on the roof
of the Lower Church at Assisi. He was allowed to erect a platform in
that dark church over the High Altar, that he might see the picture.
There he discovered that Giotto was only beaten by Tintoret in mere
science, technique, laws of perspective, composition and light and
shade, and that religion had solemnized and developed every faculty of
Giotto’s heart and hand. The Franciscan monastery at Assisi is one of
the most sacred places on earth anyhow, but 1874 saw one more gift of
light there vouchsafed, and a haunting problem solved. Art was to Ruskin
a visible manifestation of life’s full faculties, in a department he
specially understood; and religion, which is the source of strength and
the support of character, he thought should be judged by its output.

Now we turn to the second event. His hopes of the reality of a Spirit
world received unexpected and potent confirmation from the fact that in
December, 1875, he had, at the house of Lord Mount Temple, at
Broadlands, Romsey, some psychic experience so definite that he was
convinced that he had true communication with her whom he had lately
lost, the “Rosie” of _Præterita_, No. XXVII.[20] It was a confirmation
to his faith. He became an Honorary Member of the Society for Psychical
Research the year after its formation in 1882, joining in that
well-grounded hope that a true science of human Personality might be
built up by its patient experimental methods. To Lady Mount Temple,
_née_ Tollemache, the Egeria of the winter of 1840 in Rome, we owe much
for the help she was to Ruskin all through life; and much also that from
her came the stimulus to Frederick W. H. Myers and Edmund Gurney to
begin the Society for Psychical Research. Two of Ruskin’s stories of
Death wraiths may be found in _Fors_,[21] also a dream in Letter LXV. He
never took to ordinary spiritualism; it is indeed from an attack upon it
that he turns to a note describing the happiness of his own experience.
“I leave this passage as it was written; though as it passes through the
press, it is ordered by Atropos that I should hear a piece of evidence
on this matter no less clear as to the present ministry of such powers
as that which led Peter out of prison, than all the former, or nearly
all the former, evidence examined by me was of the presence of the
legion which ruled among the tombs of Gennesaret.”[22] He allows the
contradiction to stand; indeed, in this puzzling and partially known
subject, a consistent position is beyond the knowledge of most. He
returns to the attack on Spiritualism, however, in his 1883 note to the
second volume of _Modern Painters_, p. 244.

In the following year, 1876, at Venice at Christmas, he had vouchsafed
to himself the inward assurance of an immortal life; he entered into a
singular happiness; _Fors_ became the organ of a mysticism truly
Johannine; he loved to expound universal Christian truth, so catholic
indeed in the true sense that Cardinal Manning aspired to turn him to
Rome. That was a vain hope. He still retained his analytical faculty. He
says that he would “give up Moses” if criticism demanded it.[23]
Concerning his lectures of 1877 at Oxford he writes to Miss Beever in
the “hortus inclusus” at Coniston that he has been able for the first
time to speak boldly to the students of immortal life. The concluding
passage of the last lecture is this:[24]

“But obey the word in its simplicity, in wholeness of purpose and with
severity of sacrifice, like this of the Venetian Maids’, and truly you
shall receive sevenfold into your bosom in this present life, as in the
world to come, life everlasting.” “He shall give his angels charge over
you, to keep you in all your ways; and the peace of God, which passeth
all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ
Jesus.” It came to be true of himself that “if life be led under
heaven’s law, the sense of heaven’s nearness only deepens with advancing
years, and is assured in death.”[25]

“The faith of the saints and prophets rising into serenity of knowledge,
‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’ is a state of mind of which ordinary
men cannot reason; but which, in the practical power of it, has always
governed the world, and must for ever. No dynamite will ever be invented
that can rule--it can but dissolve and destroy. Only the Word of God and
the heart of man can govern.”[26]

We cannot conclude this analysis better than by quoting from the last
number of _Fors_ in 1884:

“Looking back upon my efforts for the last twenty years, I believe that
their failure has been in great part owing to my compromise with the
infidelity of this outer world, and my endeavours to base my pleading
upon motives of ordinary prudence and kindness, instead of on the
primary duty of loving God; foundation other than which no man can lay.
I thought myself speaking to a crowd which could only be influenced by
visible utility; nor was I the least aware how many entirely good and
holy persons were living in the faith and love of God as vividly and
practically now as ever in the early enthusiasm of Christendom. These
have shown me, with lovely initiation, in how many secret places the
prayer was made which I had foolishly listened for at the corners of the
streets, and on how many hills which I had thought left desolate, the
hosts of heaven still moved in chariots of fire.”[27] These passages
show that F. W. H. Myers, in the beautiful obituary which I am permitted
to print as an Epilogue, was not correct in describing the experience
with the medium at Broadlands, as Ruskin’s one brief season of blissful
trust in the Unseen. It is true of his temporary belief in spiritualism.

I trust it will have become clear that Ruskin’s spiritual history is not
a story of arbitrary and fanciful changes without connected
significance. It is the orderly development of a research, by a man
singularly qualified to hold a religious Research Fellowship.

He may be said to have matriculated in religion at his mother’s knee.
There he learnt his Bible. He took a degree with the second volume of
_Modern Painters_ and the works allied to it in spirit. He then became a
Master of Arts, qualified to teach, a recognized religious authority
among many authorities. Had he never gone to Venice and seen Tintoret he
might have built, so he says, a Catholic archiepiscopal palace at York
instead of a museum at Sheffield; or he might have been such a man as
Dean Church or John Henry Newman, on Calvinistic Protestant lines. But
Ruskin proceeded to a higher status. He must needs penetrate deeper; and
in the crisis of 1858 he took his Fellowship by a thesis on the
Irreducible Minimum of the Religious Outfit. Thenceforth he carried on
a research, he was a “seeker after God,” often wrote “in much darkness
and sorrow of heart”; and in sixteen years the conclusions were ready,
the convictions matured, the saint perfected.



_CHAPTER III_

_TO WHAT FOLD?_


To what school of thought or to which among our denominations, if to
any, can Ruskin be said to belong? He did not actively, in mature life,
belong to any, or attend Church or Chapel. Let us examine his doctrines
in this connection.

The first point which strikes the inquirer is Ruskin’s strong hostility
to professionalism in religion, to payment for preaching. Against a
separate order of clergy, maintained for that object, and claiming a
certain position by reason of their ministration, he was the most
poignant voice of his time, from inside Christianity. Letters XXXVIII,
XLIX, and LXII of _Fors Clavigera_ are full of the most unrestrained
expression of this testimony. We will quote:

“The particular kinds of folly also which lead youths to become
clergymen, uncalled, are specially intractable. That a lad just out of
his teens, and not under the influence of any deep religious enthusiasm,
should ever contemplate the possibility of his being set up in the
middle of a mixed company of men and women of the world, to instruct the
aged, encourage the valiant, support the weak, reprove the guilty, and
set an example to all; and not feel what a ridiculous and blasphemous
business it would be, if he only pretended to do it for hire; and what a
ghastly and murderous business it would be if he did it strenuously
wrong; and what a marvellous and all but incredible thing the Church and
its power must be, if it were possible for him, with all the good
meaning in the world, to do it rightly--that any youth, I say, should
ever have got himself into the state of recklessness or conceit,
required to become a clergyman at all, under existing circumstances,
must put him quite out of the pale of those whom one appeals to on any
reasonable or moral question, in serious writing.... There is certainly
no Bishop now in the Church of England who would either dare in a full
drawing-room to attribute to himself the gift of prophecy, in so many
words; or to write at the head of any of his sermons, ‘On such and such
a day, of such and such a month, in such and such a place, the Word of
the Lord came unto me, saying’:--Nevertheless he claims to have received
the Holy Ghost himself by laying on of hands; and to be able to
communicate the Holy Ghost to other men in the same manner. And he knows
that the office of the prophet is as simply recognized in the
enumeration of the powers of the ancient church, as that of the apostle
or evangelist or doctor. And yet he can neither point out in the Church
the true prophets, to whose number he dares not say that he himself
belongs, nor the false prophets, who are casting out devils in the name
of Christ without being known by him.... But the word ‘Priest’ is one
which he finds it convenient to assume himself, and to give to his
fellow clergymen. He knows, just as well as he knows prophecy to be a
gift attributed to the Christian minister, that priesthood is a function
expressly taken away from the Christian minister (as distinguished, that
is to say, from other members of the Church). He dares not say in the
open drawing-room that he offers sacrifice for any soul there; and he
knows that he cannot give authority for calling himself a priest from
any canonical book of the New Testament. So he equivocates on the sound
of the word ‘Presybter.’ ...”[28]

“This preaching of Christ has, nevertheless, become an acknowledged
profession and means of livelihood for gentlemen: and the simony of
to-day differs only from that of apostolic times, in that, while the
elder Simon thought the gift of the Holy Ghost worth a considerable
offer in ready money, the modern Simon would on the whole refuse to
accept the same gift of the Third Person of the Trinity, without a nice
little attached income, a pretty church, with a steeple restored by Mr.
Scott, and an eligible neighbourhood.”[29]

And, in soberer vein: “No way will ever be found of rightly ordaining
men who have taken up the trade of preaching as a means of livelihood,
and to whom it is a matter of personal interest whether they preach in
one place or another; only those who have left their means of living,
that they may preach, and whose peace follows them as they wander, and
abides where they enter in, are of God’s ordaining; and practically
until the Church insists that every one of her ministers shall either
have an independent income, or support himself for his ministry on
Sunday by true bodily toil during the week, no word of the living Gospel
will ever be spoken from her pulpits. How many of those who now occupy
them have verily been invited to such office by the Holy Ghost may be
easily judged by observing how many the Holy Ghost has similarly invited
of religious persons already in prosperous business or desirable
position.”[30]

Another passage from another place runs: “Take the desire of
teaching--the entirely unselfish and noble instinct for telling to those
who are ignorant the truth we know, and guarding them from the errors we
see them in danger of--there is no nobler, no more constant instinct in
honourable breasts; but let the Devil formalise it, and mix the pride of
a profession with it--get foolish people entrusted with the business of
instruction, and make their giddy heads giddier by putting them up in
pulpits above a submissive crowd--and you have it instantly corrupted
into its own reverse; you have an alliance against the light (saying)
‘Light is in us only. Shut your eyes close and fast and we will lead
you.’”[31]

In another place he says the difficult question is not, why workmen
don’t go to church, but--why other people do. He asks,[32] “What
Scripture warrant there is for the offices and authority of the clergy,
and defies anyone to find any.” Their functions, he says, must depend on
the needs of the time. “Robinson Crusoe, on his island, wants no Bishop,
and makes a thunderstorm do for an evangelist. The University of Oxford
would do ill without its Bishop, but wants an evangelist besides, and
that forthwith.”

He says that by yielding to the impression that the most sacred calling
is that of the clergy, “the sacred character of the layman himself is
forgotten, and his own ministerial duty is neglected,” and so laymen
wrongly “devote their whole time and energy to the business of this
world. No mistake can possibly be greater. Every member of the Church is
equally bound to the service of the Head of the Church, and that service
is pre-eminently the saving of souls. There is not a moment of a man’s
active life in which he may not be indirectly preaching, and throughout
a great part of his life he ought to be directly preaching, and teaching
both strangers and friends.” This is from the _Sheepfolds_ pamphlet of
1851; at that time he nevertheless contemplates church officers of a
sort, as organizers, deacons, or visitors, and thinks they may be
maintained for their special work, and includes religious instruction
and exhortation among these duties. But this last advice he supersedes
in _Fors_ of 1873 and later dates, when he places preaching on a purely
amateur basis, in the passages quoted already, and similar ones.

“All good judging, and all good preaching, must be given gratis. Look
back to what I have incidentally said of lawyers and clergy, as
professional--that is to say, as living by their judgment, and sermons.
You will perhaps now be able to receive my conclusive statement, that
all such professional sale of justice and mercy is a deadly sin. A man
may sell the work of his hands, but not his equity, nor his piety. Let
him live by his spade, and if his neighbours find him wise enough to
decide a dispute between them, or if he is in modesty and simplicity
able to give them a piece of pious advice, let him do so, in Heaven’s
name, but not take a fee for it.”[33]

In Letter XIII of _Time and Tide_ and in _Sesame and Lilies_ § 22 he
explains the sort of functions he would give to his Bishops, as
described in Chapter V.

We have incidentally alluded to Ruskin’s teaching on the Priesthood of
all Believers. He asserts that all members of the Universal Church are
Priests,[34] that the exclusive priestly claim of the Clergy is
“blasphemous,” and has no shadow of excuse, “because it has been
ordained by the Holy Spirit that no Christian minister shall once call
himself a Priest as distinguished from his flock from one end of the New
Testament to the other.”

Schools of religious thought are discriminated by nothing so decisively
as by their attitude to the Bible. They are classed at once if they call
the Bible the Word of God. This bad and quite unauthorized habit has
blinded many eyes. Ruskin attacks it again and again. “The error
consists, first, in declaring a bad translation of a group of books of
various qualities, accidentally associated, to be the Word of God.
Secondly, reading of this singular Word of God, only the bits they like,
and never taking any pains to understand even those. Thirdly, resolutely
refusing to practise even the small bits they do understand, if such
practice happen to go against their own worldly--especially
money--interests.”[35]

Compare this severe passage with one from _The Ethics of the Dust_, V §
59: “The way in which common people read their Bibles is just like the
way that the old monks thought hedgehogs ate grapes. They rolled
themselves (it was said), over and over, where the grapes lay on the
ground: what fruit stuck to their spines, they carried off and ate. So
your hedgehoggy readers roll themselves over and over their Bibles, and
declare that whatever sticks to their own spines is Scripture, and that
nothing else is.”[36]

But Ruskin is not satisfied with negative teaching on this great
subject. He tells us what the Word of God is, as well as what it is not:

“By that Word, or Voice, or Breath, or Spirit, the heavens and earth,
and all the host of them, were made, and in it they exist. It is your
life; and speaks to you always, so long as you live nobly; dies out of
you as you refuse to obey it; leaves you to hear, and be slain by, the
word of an evil spirit, instead. It may come to you in books--come to
you in clouds--come to you in the voices of men--come to you in the
stillness of deserts. You must be strong in evil, if you have quenched
it wholly;--very desolate in this Christian land, if you have never
heard it at all.”[37]

Much may be gleaned from a man’s use of the word Church. Is it a
building, or a select and limited outward community or more than either?
Ruskin, interpreting Scripture in his _Sheepfolds_,[38] finds a Low
Church divine giving the meaning of the word Church to be an “external
institution of certain forms of worship.” He therefore suggests the
following emendations: “Unto the angel of the external institution of
certain forms of worship at Ephesus write,” and “Salute the brethren
which are at Laodicea, and Nymphas, and the external institution of
certain forms of worship which is in his house.”

“I continually see subscriptions of ten, fifteen, or twenty thousand
pounds for new churches. Now a good clergyman never wants a church. He
can say all that his congregation essentially need to hear in any of his
parishioners’ best parlours, or upper chambers, or in the ball-room at
the Nag’s Head; or if these are not large enough, in the market-place,
or the harvest field. And until every soul in the parish is cared for,
and saved from such sorrow of body or mind as alms can give comfort in,
no clergyman, but in sin or heresy, can ask for a church at all. What
does he want with altars? Was the Lord’s Supper eaten on one? What with
pews?--unless rents for the pride of them? What with font and
pulpit?--that the next wayside brook, or mossy bank, cannot give him?
The temple of Christ is in His people--His order, to feed them--His
throne, alike of audience and of judgment, in Heaven: were it otherwise,
even the churches which we have already are not always open for
prayer.”[39]

He suggests that we can decide “who are Christ’s sheep, not by their
being in any definite fold, for many are lost sheep sometimes; but by
their sheeplike behaviour; and a great many are indeed sheep which, on
the far mountain side, in their peacefulness, we take for stones.”[40]
This is a delightful expression of the feeling that you may be a child
of God, without having heard of the Christian Revelation of Him.

To make Baptism a sign of admission into the visible Church he says is
absurd; “for we know that half the baptized people in the world are very
visible rogues. Also the Holy Ghost is sometimes given before Baptism,
and it would be absurdity to call a man on whom the Holy Ghost had
fallen, an invisible Christian.”[41]

On the Sacrament he declared to a correspondent in 1888 that he would
take it from anybody’s hand, the Pope’s, the Queen’s or a hedgeside
gipsy’s, and quoted Longfellow’s lines:

    “A holy family, that makes
     Each meal a supper of the Lord.”

He is drastic in his rejection of all Prayer Books. Prayers out of a
book are no prayers to him; he cannot think that varying needs are met
by routine prayer. These statements are in his _Letters to the Clergy on
the Lord’s Prayer and the Church_ (1879), reprinted in _On the Old
Road_, p. 325, and he comments on the distrust in the efficacy of prayer
likely to be produced by having to ask one day “that the rest of our
lives hereafter may be pure and holy,” knowing that next day, or at
least next Sunday, we shall be expected to confess that “there is no
health in us.” He seriously suspects the effect of the Liturgy on the
truthfulness of the English mind.

When he discusses the vital problem of the seat of Authority in religion
he declares that it ultimately resides within, not in an outward Church
or Book. He is absolutely uncompromising about this.

“There is, therefore, in matters of doctrine, no such thing as the
authority of the Church. We might as well talk of the authority of a
morning cloud. There may be light in it, but the light is not of it; and
it diminishes the light that it gets; and lets less of it through than
it receives, Christ being its sun. Or, we might as well talk of the
authority of a flock of sheep--for the Church is a body to be taught and
fed, not to teach and feed; and of all sheep that are fed on the earth,
Christ’s sheep are the most simple,” likely to die in the bramble
thickets; “but for their Shepherd, who is for ever finding them and
bearing them back, with torn fleeces and eyes full of fear.”[42]

There is also an interesting passage in _The Eagle’s Nest_ (p. 135) on
“The Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world.”

By way of Church discipline he advises a process of excommunication by a
jury of laymen.[43]

What of religious decorative art? Surely here the great art critic and
apostle of the Beautiful will be found on the ritualist side? Not so. He
says that Church art, pictures, images, and so on, “make us believe what
we would not otherwise have believed; and, secondly, make us think of
subjects we should not otherwise have thought of, intruding them amidst
our ordinary thoughts in a confusing and familiar manner.” “This art,”
he says, “is misapplied, and in most cases, very dangerously so. Our
duty is to believe in the existence of Divine, or any other, persons,
only upon rational proofs of their existence; and not because we have
seen pictures of them.”

“But I nevertheless believe that he who trusts much to such helps (as
‘Rafaelesque and other sacred paintings of a high order’) will find them
fail him at his need; and that the dependence, in any great degree, on
the presence or power of a picture, indicates a wonderfully feeble sense
of the presence and power of God. I do not think that any man, who is
thoroughly certain that Christ is in the room, will care what sort of
picture of Christ he has on its walls and, in the plurality of cases,
the delight taken in art of this kind is, in reality, nothing more than
a form of graceful indulgence of those sensibilities which the habits of
a disciplined life restrain in other directions. Such art is, in a word,
the opera and drama of the monk. Sometimes it is worse than this, and
the love of it is the mask under which a general thirst for morbid
excitement will pass itself off for religion. The young lady who rises
in the middle of the day, jaded by her last night’s ball, and utterly
incapable of any simple or wholesome religious exercise, can still gaze
into the dark eyes of the Madonna di San Sisto, or dream over the
whiteness of an ivory crucifix, and returns to the course of her daily
life in full persuasion that her morning’s feverishness has atoned for
her evening’s folly. And, all the while, the art which possesses these
very doubtful advantages is acting for undoubtful detriment, in the
various ways above examined (in a previous passage), on the inmost
fastnesses of faith; it is throwing subtle endearments round foolish
traditions, confusing sweet fancies with sound doctrines, and enforcing
false assertions with pleasant circumstantiality, until, to the usual,
and assuredly sufficient, difficulties standing in the way of belief,
its votaries have added a habit of sentimentally changing what they know
to be true, and of dearly loving what they confess to be false.”

“Has there then (the reader asks emphatically) been no true religious
ideal? Has religious art never been of any service to mankind? I fear,
on the whole, not.

“More, I think, has always been done for God by few words than many
pictures, and more by few acts than many words.”

“And for us all there is in this matter even a deeper danger than that
of indulgence. There is the danger of Artistical Pharisaism. Of all the
forms of pride and vanity, as there are none more subtle, so I believe
there are none more sinful, than those which are manifested by the
Pharisees of art. To be proud of birth, of place, of wit, of bodily
beauty, is comparatively innocent, just because such pride is more
natural, and more easily detected. But to be proud of our sanctities; to
pour contempt upon our fellows because, forsooth, we like to look at
Madonnas in bowers of roses, better than at plain pictures of plain
things; and to make this religious art of ours the expression of our own
perpetual self-complacency--congratulating ourselves, day by day, on
our purities, proprieties, elevations, and inspirations, as above the
reach of common mortals, this I believe to be one of the wickedest and
foolishest forms of human egotism.”[44]

These clear-sounding testimonies form a coherent whole. Is there any
religious body in England which holds all, or even most of these
positions? Remarkably enough, there is one which holds them all; indeed,
whose separate existence depends on holding just these positions,
positive and negative alike. This one is the Society of Friends. We find
to our surprise that, without knowing it, Ruskin was a real and very
completely furnished Quaker.

The testimony against a paid or professional clergy, against all
clerical claims, is the very heart of Quaker practice; and the _raison
d’être_ of their separate meetings. The Priesthood of all Believers is
at the heart of their official statements, and the implication in their
ministry. They say that there should be no laity among them, exactly as
Ruskin does. They decline all forms of fixed or routine prayer, and
never practise them. Their meeting houses are plain, and their worship
is ascetically devoid of sensuous attraction in glowing glass or carven
stone or in the odour of incense.

It is one of their central historical testimonies, dating from the
seventeenth century, that the Bible should not be called the Word of
God. For this they were called atheists by the clergy of Charles II. The
controversies of that time rarely avoided touching on this sore point.
For them, as for Ruskin, the seat of authority is The Light Within, and,
like Ruskin, they are willing to “give up Moses” if history demands it.

The attitude of Ruskin to Baptism and the Lord’s Supper is a thoroughly
Quaker one. Both hold that they are unnecessary and have no “Validity.”
The only “Church” they recognize is the Universal Church composed of all
faithful men everywhere; and as Ruskin speaks of sheep on distant
mountains who look like stones, so Friends have always held that the
heathen were or could be saints of the household of God, and that
knowledge of the historical Jesus Christ was not essential to salvation
here or hereafter.

There is a remarkable omission too. So far as I know Ruskin never speaks
of Hell, as an article of faith. Nor does it ever occur in Quaker
ministry.

It is almost uncanny that there is an agreement also on minor
testimonies which might appear accidental. Friends do not approve of
mourning garments, though there is in this generation some weakness
about this. Ruskin thinks that “the people who really believe in
immortality must be few, else why the Church’s singular habit of putting
on mourning for every one summoned to be with Christ, which is far
better.”[45]

It is well known that Friends refuse to take judicial Oaths, and gave a
handle thereby to hostile magistrates, when other handles slipped away.
Ruskin says plainly that Oaths are “disobedience to the teaching of
Christ.”[46]

I believe we have now mentioned all the points of Quakerism, except the
testimony against all War. From Chapter VIII devoted to this, it is
clear that Ruskin was generally, but not always, on Quaker lines. He
wobbled somewhat, and felt puzzled, and I am afraid that a certain
number of Friends have done the same at times of crisis.

Lastly, the Quaker simplicity of life, the avoidance of luxury and
social pretensions, the fixing of attention chiefly on the things of
the spirit, are Ruskin’s dearest delight, the subject of his most
earnest pleas. Take one:

“The uses, and the desire, of seclusion, of meditation, of restraint,
and of correction, are they not passing from us in the collision of
worldly interests, and restless contests of mean hope and meaner fear?
The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear?”[47]

For a man who, in the name and for the sake of spiritual things, fought
the good fight of a reformer during two generations, Ruskin was but
little brought into personal friendship with members of the Society of
Friends. George Baker, of Bewdley, who was one of the early donors to
the St. George’s Guild and was long one of its Trustees, and afterwards
its Master, is the principal personal link he had with the Society.
Henry Swan, formerly his curator at the Sheffield Museum, was a Friend.

When the writer, as one of a party of Friends, was kindly shown over
Brantwood by its owner in 1884, the only things he had to say to us
about Quakerism in the course of a forty minutes’ talk, were a little
homily on sectarianism, contrasted with a church of “God-fearing
people,” including Catholics and Turks--a little chaff about our
failing in the matter of usury to literally obey our Bibles, as he
supposed we thought we always tried to do--and an astonishing
pronouncement that “Your early Friends would have carried all before
them, if they had not opposed that which is obeyed by the whole of the
animal creation--the love of colour.” We must take this as one of the
characteristic plunges into emphasis (some well-balanced people would
use a stronger term perhaps), which are a cause at once of his strength
as a stimulating teacher, and of his insufficiency as an infallible
oracle, to be mechanically interpreted.

These three utterances, however, slight as they are, show a misreading
of Quakerism. We are, I trust, the least sectional of little sects. The
religion of the Light Within is at the basis of all other religions too;
it is the absolute religion, religion reduced to its simplest, and it
brings us into sympathetic connection with Evangelical, Ritualist, Jew,
Mohammedan and “heathen,” so far as these have the Divine Spirit shining
through their particular forms of thought and practice. Also, of all
people, we are the least prone to unintelligent Biblical literalism, and
are quite unlikely to be stumbled by the Mosaic regulations about
usury. There is a measure of truth in his third statement about
“colour,” if by that he meant, in a comprehensive sense, those
recreations which relieve the strain of a severely ruled life. We have
become less numerous, I doubt not, through our restrictions (now
abandoned) on art, music, “the theatre and the ball-room.” But there
have been compensations to those who have stayed under the discipline.

Ruskin, then, never understood the Society of Friends in the outward.
This was the mere result of circumstances. Brought up in the south of
London, educated at Oxford, living much abroad, with local interests and
acquaintances chiefly centering round Denmark Hill, Oxford and Coniston,
he had no great opportunity to meet Friends.

He never had any Quaker teaching in his youth. The voice of the Society
of Friends was too faint to reach him. He never found his way across the
hill from Brantwood to the ancient meeting house at Hawkshead, but his
word has penetrated further than ours, and all unaware he has done our
work.

How marvellous is this series of harmonies, unintended, unrecognized on
both sides, between him and the Society of Friends! It looks as though
Quakerism is not an arbitrary group of doctrines gathered up, as he
fancied them, by George Fox, but a coherent system, all whose parts hang
together as they all appear together when they rise up in Ruskin. It is
a strong confirmation of the coherence and validity of the religious
discoveries of our Quaker forefathers in the seventeenth century, when
we find that they are repeated in the research of another emancipated
but devout thinker, a religious rationalist who was an expert in the
things of the soul.



_CHAPTER IV_

_RUSKIN AND MILL_

A RECONCILIATION


The controversy between Ruskin and the orthodox Political Economists of
his time was central in his career, and has occupied a prominent place
in the thought of the last sixty years. Either Ruskin’s teaching or that
of Mill and his colleagues, or that of both, has been clouded with
uncertainty and so has lost force. If it should be found, as I shall try
to show, that there was no real ground for the controversy at all--that
it was all due to misapprehension, to mere ambiguity in a term, it will
reinforce the conclusions of the economists in their modern revised
form, add cogency to the teaching of Ruskin, and clear away storm clouds
which have done great harm. The mistake arose through a wrong conception
by Ruskin of the scope of Economics--of what its teachers were after.

Political Economy has always been treated by careful writers as the
science of human action with regard to the acquisition and use of
property. This is a pure science. It is a branch of applied psychology.
It measures motives, and analyses the action of buyers and sellers with
a view to finding out what men in business will normally do, and how
values of land, labour, capital and commodities are determined. This
does not open any question of right or wrong, any question of oppression
or starvation, of luxury, vanity or pride. This is as cold-blooded, as
purely intellectual and critical an inquiry as the study and measurement
of electrical currents; what produces them, conducts them, wastes or
scatters them. An electrician will show how a telephone may be made, he
will invent it, and he will explain it; but it is no business of his to
ask whether courtesy and good feeling or profanity and fraud will
characterize the messages which will go over his instrument. That is not
his business as a scientist, though the use of his own telephone is his
business as a man.

Now this is a perfectly intelligible, it may be a perfectly blameless,
and, at first sight, a probably useful branch of inquiry. It separates
off from the great mass of human actions a definite field; it omits the
motive of religion, the motive of love, and the motive of self-denying
service, outside service for the family for whom the man under
discussion is economically responsible.

Concerning it, we must ask three questions:

1. Is this separation practicable, and in consequence are the results
true or approximately true?

2. Under what limitations is it useful to make such a separation, and
what real guidance to conduct, if any, follows?

3. Afterwards we will inquire to what extent the political economists
have rigidly confined themselves to theory, and having found that they
did not, when they went over into practical advice we will ask whether
they were deluded by the results they had reached within their limits,
and whether they hastily assumed that they had found a more complete
guide to human action than they had.

Is then the separation of dealings which can be expressed in terms of
money from the other dealings of life sufficiently possible to make a
science of those dealings? Are they predictable, given the
circumstances? Will like causes produce like results? Is the motive
measured by money sufficiently separable from other motives, to be
treated by itself?

We must at once admit that such separation cannot be absolute; that
affection, pity, charity, habit, ignorance, legislative restriction,
public spirit, prevent the individual from always acting according to
his economic interests. He does not always buy in the cheapest shop; he
grumbles but helps a struggling neighbour by his custom, and puts up for
some time with an inferior article. He goes on using old machinery for
want of knowledge or of a progressive mind. He keeps on an old hand for
the sake of the past. Still, in the long run, these qualifications to
the general law do not survive. In general, men in the large may be
trusted to do that which it is their economic interest to do, within
such lines of honesty as are ratified by law, or of honour as are
regarded by public opinion. Competition, that is, is the general rule in
business; and we shall not go far wrong in assuming it as the method in
vogue in Europe and America, unless some special feature of monopoly or
legislative Protection or trade combination supersedes it.

This is not the same as saying that it is always right to follow the
lines of pure competition. We must at all points check the tendency to
pass from the indicative to the imperative mood, from a science to an
art; from what will raise our profits to what is our duty in our
business.

So we assert that there is a Theory of Value, and that it is an
approximately verified theory under the present system of business.
Further, that in 1860, when business was less regulated than it is now,
the results were so much nearer verification by experience.

That business is carried on for self-interest on the whole, seems to me
a safe approximation to reality--and that the exceptions to it are not
chemically explosive of its system as Ruskin says, but can be added to
the enquiry afterwards, like friction or the resistance of the air in
mechanics.

Whether this is desirable, or the last word of human organization, is
quite another question; and the questions are better kept separate.
Moral considerations are too important to come in as an incidental
qualification to business motives. They should be the dominating
influence, and it is better that economic results should not obtain a
sort of sanction as being tinctured with righteousness, when only a few
drops of the tincture have been administered. It is better that
Economics should keep their place as a science of observed facts.

At the present moment when war is being diagnosed as the worst disease
of society, there are many voices to point out its origin in economic
greed, and through rivalry in the exploitation of backward peoples.
Military pomp and pride, the mere ambition of Emperors and Generals,
must bear their share of the blame, but greed and oppression are the
tap-root of war, and Ruskin, it happens, was foremost in saying so, as
is pointed out in a later chapter.

The economic motive is behind many actions where it is not avowed. Since
the elementary need of man is, and always has been, to make a living,
and he tries to make it as pleasantly as possible, this must be so, and
the laws which govern production, distribution and exchange are of prime
importance for men in communities.

When Ruskin touched on an economic law, on a doctrine of the science
which he thus erroneously blasphemed, he was remarkably correct; he was
an orthodox follower after all of much of the doctrine of Mill. He was
“an utterly fearless and unscrupulous free trader.”[48] His instinct,
the moral sanction to which he always looked--as Mill also did--as a
guide to practice, told him that protection was a wicked action,
forbidding to workers in other countries their right to earn their
living in the way by which they could produce the most. “I mean by
co-operation, not only fellowship between trading firms, but between
trading nations; so that it shall no more be thought (as it is now, with
ludicrous and vain selfishness) an advantage for one nation to undersell
another, and take its occupation away from it; but that the primal and
eternal law of commerce shall be of all men understood--viz., that every
nation is fitted by its character and the nature of its territories for
some particular employments and manufactures, and that it is the true
interest of every other nation to encourage it in such speciality.”[49]
“I do not admit even the idea of reciprocity. Let other nations, if they
like, keep their ports shut; every wise nation will throw its own
open.”[50] He knew every point of the correct economic theory of free
trade. He realized foreign commerce as exchange or barter, with the
dependence of exports upon imports. This dependence, showing the true
nature of International Trade, follows from the correct doctrine of
currency. Ruskin emphasized this doctrine repeatedly. He knew that
every fall in the supply of commodities made the gold currency of less
value. He knew that inflation by paper money similarly sent prices up.
He was enthusiastic for a gold standard, not as being perfect, but being
the best available.[51] Mill’s still valuable chapter on International
Trade and all current economic doctrine on currency are Ruskinian
economy too. Also, when a disciple of the much depreciated Manchester
School talked of _laisser faire_ he generally meant: “Let Protection
alone.” His phrase was general, but in the days of Gladstone’s
chancellorships of the exchequer, the “Manchester” man was thinking
mainly of the removal of tariffs. It would not be in accord with human
psychology if the principle had not been pushed too far, and by friends
and opponents alike the principle of governmental abstention from
interference enlarged, and made universal. In calling for government
action to determine wages and organize employment, Ruskin was simply
uttering a need not yet felt. He was a twentieth century voice, heard
too soon.

But we must always avoid the snare into which the earlier economists
fell, of assuming that their conclusions were rigid and absolutely
correct. There can be no mechanical infallibility about Economics; it is
not accurate enough to be mathematically true. It expresses tendencies.
In a word, it is a psychological, not a physical science. Its subject is
not wealth, simply, but human motive in regard to wealth.

Students of the Political Economy of Adam Smith, Ricardo, Bentham and
James Mill, find that these great founders of economic science, in whose
debt we shall ever remain, assumed too much mechanical uniformity in
men’s actions, and did not give enough weight to the reaction of man
upon his circumstances. They counted a man too much as a passively
responsive machine. This is what led them to the doctrines since so
seriously modified--the existence of a fixed Wages Fund, the “Iron Law
of Wages,” the thesis that “A demand for Commodities is not a demand for
Labour.”

John Stuart Mill began life under these influences, and his _Principles
of Political Economy_ contain them; but in later life he abandoned his
Wages Fund theory, gave greater weight to the human side, the variable
and uncertain factor in economic problems, and under the influence of
Comte and of the Socialists doubted the accuracy of much of his economic
argument. This change was published in his review of the work of his
friend Thornton, who had attacked the Wages Fund theory in 1869. It is
in Mill’s collected Essays.

The Political Economy which Ruskin attacked was that of Mill’s
_Principles_; and to judge fairly of the controversy we must treat the
science, not as it was left, in high universal abstraction, by Ricardo;
nor as worked up with rich historical material, cautious and well
informed, as in Professor Marshall’s writings, but (between these) as
Mill left it in his first edition of 1848.

In estimating the extent to which Ruskin’s attack was excusable, we need
to know whether Mill overstepped the bounds of theory, of pure
science--and became a political adviser and exhorter. This he certainly
did, quite often in his book, and he says in his preface that it was
part of his purpose to do so.

Ruskin says that it is when he is thus inconsistent with his own theory,
and strays into practical teaching, that he begins to take any interest
in him; and certainly Mill gave, precisely because he was a
philanthropist and a social reformer, room for a critic to come in and
say: “Lo, you pretend to be a practical guide to conduct, and you are
only taking account of low and selfish motives; you are an unworthy
exponent of human nature, if we are to regard you as taking it all for
your province.” The chapters chiefly referred to here are those on “The
Advantages of a Stationary State,” and on “The Futurity of the Labouring
Classes.”

Ruskin recognizes and admits this in a clever but naughty way:

“I should have regretted the need of pointing out inconsistency in any
portion of Mr. Mill’s work, had not the value of his work proceeded from
its inconsistencies. He deserves honour among economists by
inadvertently disclaiming the principles which he states, and tacitly
introducing the moral considerations with which he claims his science
has no connection. Many of his chapters are therefore true and valuable;
and the only conclusions of his which I have to dispute are those which
follow from his premises.”[52] Mill made the distinction between science
and social reform quite plain in his chapters, and left no room for
confusion. Ruskin must have thoroughly understood this.

Full in the face of this theoretical investigation comes Ruskin’s
definition of Political Economy, with which he begins _Munera Pulveris_:

“Political Economy is neither an art nor science, but a system of
conduct and legislature, founded on the sciences, directing the arts,
and impossible, except under certain conditions of moral culture.”

Here we have an entirely different object. This Economy aims at telling
us what we ought to do for the enriching and purifying of life upon the
earth, and what the state ought to do for the same end. This is
universal politics and social amelioration: frankly and definitely, not
a science at all.

There need be no conflict between this comprehensive study of political
ethics, including religion, art, and education among its principal
departments--and that science which might usefully come in as one of
those on which it is based. To be sure, both claim to be called
Political Economy; but that is only a verbal rivalry. As to that,
Ruskin’s Political Economy has by derivation the proper right to the
term--the State’s Housekeeping. But it is not always wise to follow
derivations; the scholastic Economy was in possession of the word,
though properly speaking it was not ὁικονομἱα nor was it πολῑτῐκή.
Ruskin’s weakness for playing with etymologies, often curious ones,
helped to maintain this rivalry in words.

There is room for both studies, the scholastic economies and the
Ruskinian economy. That is my thesis.

How differently the criticism of Carlyle and Ruskin might have been
launched. Ruskin might have said that he admitted that in business
people must be assumed to follow their own interests, that is, that the
“economic man” would stand as a general average in business relations.
But he might have said, after that, every word that he wanted to say,
about the insufficiency of this principle as a guide to conduct. He
might have dwelt on the strength of loyalties and affections, and on the
powerful economic value of good relations between masters and servants.
He might have shown how misleading were economic results if acted on as
a complete handbook of conduct even in business. He might have written
_Unto This Last_ with an introduction by John Stuart Mill, and
everything positive or constructive left in it. The satire and
sword-play might have been used for something else.

Much of his attack might have taken the form of entirely sound but
friendly criticism. Great play is made with a sentence of Ricardo’s:[53]
“Utility is not the measure of exchangeable value, though it is
absolutely essential to it.” This non-committal sentence does not carry
us very far, and does not claim to be a definition, but is true as far
as it goes. Ruskin makes hay of Ricardo’s statement next following, that
Labour was, in primitive abstraction at any rate, the sole regulator of
price. Neither he nor Ruskin had reached the modern theory of “marginal
values” which solves so many ancient puzzles and misunderstandings.
Price is fixed where Demand and Supply meet: and it measures two things.
It represents on one side the value in use of the last article produced;
and on the other the cost in labour of the production thereof. Then both
sides are satisfied--the buyer and the seller. But the price does not
represent the utility of the earliest articles produced--the first
loaves of bread would be quite priceless,--nor the cost of the
production of the first few easily grown crops. Both values are “final”
or “marginal.” This simple and permanent plan of determining price,
which nobody can or should alter, is, put shortly, the terrible law of
supply and demand, the very heart of economic theory, about which so
much indignation is wastefully expended. If Ruskin’s penetrating mind
had been devoted to helpful criticism of the gaps left by the
economists, they might have reached this theory much earlier. But Ruskin
wrote in a state of noble rage--a bad state for the scientific temper.
“Nothing in history,” he wrote, “has ever been so disgraceful to human
intellect as the acceptance among us of the common doctrines of
political economy as a science.”[54] This was chiefly because it was
said to be a systematic disobedience to the first principles of its
professed religion, because it taught “the love of money” and “mammon
service”; it was “a science of becoming rich.” Once accept so terrible a
misconception, and all the vials of the prophets’ wrath are not too
profuse. “To this science and to this alone (the professed and organized
pursuit of money) is owing all the evil of modern days. I say all.”[55]
Ruskin wrote in 1865 a letter to the _Daily Telegraph_ in which he says
people cannot get servants by political economy and the law of supply
and demand--as though he had said they cannot be got by physics and the
law of gravitation. To see his real attitude we must add a phrase of
1883: “While I admit there is such a thing as mercantile economy,
distinguished from social, I have always said that neither Mill, Fawcett
nor Bastiat knew the contemptible science they professed to teach.”[56]

This attitude is pure disaster, comparable to the great _odia
theologica_ which have cursed the world. It is not necessary nor wise to
take sides in an utterly baseless controversy. Let us rather examine the
programme of the science.

Prof. Marshall gives the following list of the inquiries chiefly pursued
by economic science[57]:--

“How does economic freedom tend, so far as its influence reaches, to
arrange the demand for wealth and its production, distribution and
exchange? What organization of industry and trade does economic freedom
tend to bring about; what forms of division of labour; what arrangements
of the money market, of wholesale and retail dealing, and what relations
between employer and employed? How does it tend to adjust values, that
is, the prices of material things, whether produced on the spot or
brought from a distance, rents of all kinds, interest on capital and the
earnings of all forms of work, including that of undertaking and
managing business enterprises? How does it affect the course of foreign
trade? Subject to what limitations is the price of anything a measure of
its real utility? What increase of happiness is _prima facie_ likely to
result from a given increase in the wealth of any class of society? How
far is the industrial efficiency of any class impaired by the
insufficiency of its income? How far would an increase of the income of
any class, if once effected, be likely to sustain itself through its
effects in increasing their efficiency and earning power?

“How far does, as a matter of fact, the influence of economic freedom
reach, or how far has it reached at any particular time, in any place,
in any rank of society, or in any particular branch of industry? What
other influences are most powerful there? and how is the action of all
these influences combined? In particular, how far does not economic
freedom tend of its own action to build up combinations and monopolies,
and what are their effects? How are the various classes of society
likely to be affected by its action in the long run? What will be the
intermediate effects while its ultimate results are being worked out;
and, account being taken of the time over which they will spread, what
is the relative importance of these two classes of ultimate and
intermediate effects? What will be the incidence of any system of taxes?
What burdens will it impose on the community, and what revenue will it
afford to the State?”

Such then, is the subject matter of economic science spread out in some
detail. But behind all these there are practical questions which give
the chief motive to our interest in the subject; and though not within
the actual range of the science, it will be of interest to us to hear
the same authority state them. They vary very much from time to time.
The earlier economists were occupied with the need of removing
restrictions on free commerce, and government regulation generally, and
they glorified economic freedom. We ask with Marshall:

“How should we act so as to increase the good and diminish the evil
influences of economic freedom, both in its ultimate results, and in
the course of its progress? If the first are good and the latter evil,
but those who suffer the evil do not reap the good, how far is it right
that they should suffer for the benefit of others?”

“Taking it for granted that a more equal distribution of wealth is to be
desired, how far would this justify changes in the institution of
property, or limitations of free enterprise, even when they would be
likely to diminish the aggregate of wealth? In other words, how far
should an increase in the income of the poorer classes and a diminution
of their work be aimed at, even if it involved some lessening of
national material wealth? How far could this be done without injustice,
and without slackening the energies of the leaders of progress? How
ought the burdens of taxation to be distributed among the different
classes of society?”

“Ought we to rest content with the existing forms of division of labour?
Is it necessary that large numbers of the people should be exclusively
occupied with work that has no elevating character? Is it possible to
educate gradually among the great mass of workers a new capacity for the
higher kinds of work, and in particular for undertaking co-operatively
the management of the businesses in which they are themselves employed?”

“What are the proper relations of individual and collective action in a
stage of civilization such as ours? How far ought voluntary association
in its various forms, old and new, to be left to supply collective
action for those purposes for which such action has special advantages?
What business affairs should be undertaken by society itself acting
through the Government, imperial or local? Have we, for instance,
carried as far as we should the plan of collective ownership and use of
open spaces, or works of art, of the means of instruction and amusement,
as well as of those material requisites of a civilized life, the supply
of which requires united action, such as gas and water and railways?”

“When Government does not itself directly intervene, how far should it
allow individuals and corporations to conduct their own affairs as they
please? How far should it regulate the management of railways and other
concerns which are to some extent in a position of monopoly, and again,
of land and other things the quantity of which cannot be increased by
man? Is it necessary to retain in their full force all the existing
rights of property, or have the original necessities for which they were
meant to provide, in some measure passed away?”

“Are the prevailing methods of using wealth entirely justifiable? What
scope is there for the moral pressure of social opinion in constraining
and directing individual action in those economic relations in which the
rigidity and violence of Government interference would be likely to do
more harm than good?

“In what respect do the duties of one nation to another in economic
matters differ from those of members of the same nation to one another?”

In fact, we have to deal with the problems of Socialism, of
Co-operation, of Municipal action, of Luxury and of Trade Wars. He might
have added Pauperism and Old Age Pensions, Standard Wages and Hours, and
Nationalization of various kinds of property. There is a strong and
audible echo of Ruskin’s aims about these practical problems; and one
does not yet see why we cannot make room in our own minds both for
economic science and the Ruskinian Economy to which these issues belong.

There are passages, too, in Mill, which Ruskin himself might have
written, which look beyond Production and Distribution to the larger
needs and joys of man. He is considering the stationary state of capital
and wealth, when economic progress has ceased, when people are not
always growing more numerous and more wealthy, a state dreaded by the
older economists, and ever to be held at arm’s length. But Mill says he
thinks it would be better than our present condition. “I confess I am
not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the
normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on, that the
trampling, crushing, elbowing and treading on each other’s heels, which
form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of
humankind, or anything but the disagreeable symptoms of one of the
phases of industrial progress. The northern and middle states of America
are a specimen of this stage of civilization in very favourable
circumstances, having apparently got rid of all social injustices and
inequalities, that affect persons of Caucasian race and of the male sex,
while the proportion of population to capital and land is such as to
ensure abundance to every able-bodied member of the community who does
not forfeit it by misconduct. They have the six points of Chartism, and
they have no poverty; and all that these advantages do for them is that
the life of the whole of one sex is devoted to dollar-hunting, and of
the other to breeding dollar-hunters. The best state for human nature is
that in which, while no one is poor, no one desires to be richer, nor
has any reason to fear being thrust back by the efforts of others to
push themselves forward.”[58]

That is Ruskin without the eloquence; that is his advice to stay in the
station in which we have been placed, and not be always trying to get
out of it. A little more from Mill:

“I know not why it should be matter of congratulation that persons who
are already richer than any one needs to be, should have doubled their
means of consuming things which give little or no pleasure except as
representative of wealth, or that numbers should pass over, every year,
from the middle classes into a richer class, or from the class of the
occupied rich to that of the unoccupied.”

This reminds one of the well-known passage where Ruskin speaks of those
who try “to advance in life without knowing what life means, who mean
only that they are to get more horses and more footmen and more fortune
and more public honours and--not more personal soul.”[59]

As some injustice has been done to Mill, particularly by us the pupils
and friends of his eloquent antagonist, I will quote a little more from
him to show that though the laws of Nature were represented by him as
hard, he was himself as Ruskinian as any of us. He suggests a limitation
of the right of bequest, so that no one should receive by gift or
inheritance more than a moderate independence, so that there might be “a
well paid and affluent body of labourers; no enormous fortunes, except
what were earned and accumulated during a single lifetime; but a much
larger body sufficiently at leisure to cultivate freely the graces of
life.” Just so does Ruskin tell us that a man who dies rich dies
disgraced. Mill proceeds to express his dread of greater density of
population, because it crowds out solitude, so needful for depth of
character, and takes away wild natural beauty. The whole passage might
have come from Brantwood.

As to machinery, Mill goes on in the very spirit of _Fors Clavigera_:
“Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made
have lightened the day’s toil of any human being. They have enabled a
greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment,
and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make large
fortunes.” I am afraid that with posterity John Stuart Mill may suffer
in reputation from being the object of so much invective, embedded in
peerless English, and written under a mighty spirit of prophesying.
_Fors Clavigera_ and _Unto This Last_ will be read much longer than
Mill’s _Principles_, and future ages may describe him as a cold-blooded
Philistine, when really he was among the best and wisest of men. Certain
Stoics and Epicureans, of whom all we know is that they encountered
Paul, have hardly had justice from the ordinary English reader of the
Acts. Mill obtained the verdict of contemporaries: but the future is the
charmer’s.

In some ways these two protagonists, both of them among the princes of
our race, were strangely alike in their history. Mill, born in 1806, was
the elder by thirteen years. Both children were extraordinarily
precocious, Mill with his Greek at two, Ruskin with his pencil and his
poetry at seven. At sixteen Mill was writing in _The Traveller_ in
defence of his father and of Ricardo. From eighteen to twenty he
contributed to the _Westminster Review_ and other journals articles on
the Game Laws, the Corn Laws, the Law of Libel and on a Paper Currency,
and reviews of books on Economics. At this age Ruskin’s poetry was
appearing in _Friendship’s Garland_, and at twenty-four he came out with
the first volume of _Modern Painters_, with a fully developed style made
in heaven, and an originality in his art criticism which made him a
public man at once. Each of them, after a long and famous literary life,
gave the world an autobiography it would not willingly lose.

They were both only sons, brought up with unusual solicitude, close
parental control and remarkably severe if loving discipline. Their
attachment to and regard for their parents was a great power with both,
all their lives. The gravity, earnestness, and deep sense of
responsibility taught in childhood never left either of them.

Both passed through the fires which try faith; and there are reasons for
believing in both cases that what might have been a happy marriage was
frustrated by want of conventional orthodoxy. So that they both suffered
for the cause of truth in the hardest of all ways. Each of them had
only six or seven years of married life, and neither left any children.

Strangely enough, also, Mill was forty-one when his _Principles of
Political Economy_ was written, and Ruskin at forty-one brought out his
papers in the _Cornhill_, under the title of _Unto This Last_, which are
his counterblast to Mill.

Each of them found it necessary in later life to recant some of their
earlier teaching, and each faithfully did so. Mill gave up the Wages
Fund Theory he had learnt from his father, and Ruskin scatters the later
editions of his earlier works with notes denouncing the dogmatic
evangelicalism which runs through them, which he had learnt from his
mother.

So, in tragic conflict, these two men are before us. Not that Mill ever
replied. He died in 1872, and during his lifetime he could afford to
ignore the eccentricities of an unstable genius, at whom all sober
people smiled in pity. But now I would fain even for Mill’s sake
reconcile them. You have true tragedy, not when right meets wrong, the
noble the ignoble, but when two principles, both noble, are brought into
a conflict they cannot avoid--Mill, the Liberal, the rationalist, with
his watchwords of equality, liberty and a free chance for all--and
Ruskin the Conservative, the indignant enemy of mechanical progress,
speaking ever of order and obedience, reverence and graded ranks:--Mill,
a servant of present humanity, with but a faint critical hold on the
Unseen; Ruskin, emotional and inspired, who not seldom would fain call
down fire from heaven on Mill’s newly enfranchised citizens, because
they blasphemed.

So that I conclude that scholastic Economics is a reliable, useful
scientific enquiry, forming a basis for the very same practical aims
which Ruskin has set us striving for, and written by men who loved their
fellows and were conspicuous examples of uprightness and benevolence,
truth-keeping and friends of their kind.

We know how unscrupulous men of business used their conclusions,
particularly those conclusions which have not stood the test of
criticism, as a sort of textbook of oppression, as giving a scientific
necessity for starvation, and so excusing hardness of heart. That this
was so, must be Ruskin’s excuse for declaring war upon the economists.
But it was a war wholly unnecessary; it clouded his prophecy with
confused issues, and it laid the Master himself among the wounded.

It will be necessary, in order properly to express the scope of
Political Economy, to examine more fully its definition of the two
factors whose action and reaction upon one another form the subject
matter of the science. These two factors are Man and Wealth. What is Man
as an economic being? What is the “economic man”?

He is assumed by Mill and others[60] as a being who considers his own
side of a bargain only, who in all contracts will do the best he can for
himself, and who, in the use of his capital, and the direction of his
labour, is influenced by an intelligent and passionless eye to his own
interests. He has no regard for custom, or public opinion, or
compassion, or resentment, or personal partiality, or class prejudice.

Mill does not pretend that this person actually exists; but that the
tendency of things is as though he did exist; and that it is most easy
to assume his existence, and after that recognize the qualifications
which other parts of human nature require us to put in, just as in
mechanics we calculate what would happen if surfaces were smooth, and
then allow for friction afterwards.

Ruskin’s criticisms are not always fair. He writes:

“Political Economy, being a science of wealth, must be a science
respecting human capacities and dispositions. But moral considerations
have nothing to do with political economy (says Mill). Therefore, moral
considerations have nothing to do with human capacities and
dispositions.”[61]

Perhaps the logical fallacy is not very obvious, but it is there. Human
capacities and dispositions touch moral considerations on one side, and
they touch political economy on the other. But these two need not
therefore be connected. Because a man has two relations, as a citizen
and as a father, and because the state does not bring up his children,
and the two relations are separate, we must not argue that the man has
nothing to do with his family, because the state, with which he is also
connected, has nothing to do with it. All this wrong criticism was
produced by the obvious remark of Mill, that the ethical character of a
taste for diamonds is not the economist’s affair.

It is only as a first approximation, then, that economics postulates the
monster known as the economic man; cold, calculating, well informed,
shrewd, selfish with the unthinking uniformity of a machine. It is
perhaps clearer to say that it can take account only of such motives as
are sufficiently regular and predictable to be worth so much in money.
Some unselfish actions are of that kind, such as a man’s service to his
children, or if he be a Highlander to his third cousin; and we can
predict certain of his regular subscriptions. The Law of Supply and
Demand applies to ministers and missionaries and hospital nurses, though
their payment is all from charitable gifts. To some extent the Charity
Fund is a steady sum in any nation. It could be predicted that when the
national War Fund was absorbing large sums, other charities,
particularly London charities, would suffer; and such has been the case.
The same phenomenon occurred to a less degree when General Booth was
raising his Darkest England Fund. Here is a charitable motive steady
enough to be measurable.

It is not assumed here, as so constantly asserted by Ruskin, that men
are and must be treated as rogues. The argument of Ruskin was that the
qualifications to be introduced into problems due to the fact that man
is not an economic man, are not like allowances for friction, or other
mechanical matters, but are organic and revolutionary. The right reply
probably is that sometimes this is so, but far more generally not so.

When remarkable instances of unselfishness occur outside the family
circle, where the economist expects and allows for them, they are told
as instances of the unexpected. When the newspaper boys near the Mansion
House are found giving an undisturbed beat to a lame boy who could not
compete with them in running to customers, and refuse to sell a paper
there, the admiring customer concludes his beautiful and kindly story by
asking how many business men round the Mansion House would leave a rival
in possession because of his weakness?

The definition of Wealth must now be considered. Mill defines it as
consisting of “All useful and agreeable things which possess
exchangeable value.”

He decides to include in the wealth of a country such personal
qualities, skill, energy, perseverance, as tend to make the man who
possesses them industrially more valuable. A skilled cotton spinner is a
greater national asset than a labourer; a skilled medical man who can
restore to labourers their industrial efficiency, is also national
wealth, a utility embodied in a person; but a gifted preacher, whose
message may even make a man a less keen producer of wealth than he was
before, would not be an instance of national wealth, unless he made, as
he might, a drunkard or a loafer into a regular wage earner. So the
actor, or the singer, or the orator, unless their work ultimately
produces material goods, is not to be counted wealth in economics. There
is evidently the usual difficulty about drawing the line.

What is more, the most precious parts of character are excluded from
national wealth in the economic sense. Wealth, that is, is taken to mean
property, and not, more generally, the means of true well-being. Again,
the most necessary things are from their abundance not wealth. Air,
sunshine, and water are not wealth where and when they are given
profusely by nature; though they are the most needful supports to life.
But air which has to be pumped in by a ventilating fan has cost
something, and is wealth; sunshine which has passed through a coal
measure and is brought to our firegrates on a winter’s night is wealth,
water turned on at our taps is wealth for which we pay a water-rate. We
may come to import oxygen into our halls and theatres and lecture rooms,
perhaps even into our cellar workrooms, and then it too will have a
price and an economic value.

There is clearly room for much difference of opinion in detail here. And
yet it will be plain to all that the subject matter of a science must be
limited; we must know when our studies begin and end. It is not
demoralization which makes an economist deny holiness to be wealth, it
is a classification of sciences. Holiness is not matter either, nor
electricity, nor gas; it does not come into Physics any more than into
Economics. It comes into Ethics and Theology and practical Politics, and
it is the most important thing in the world. It may be true, as Ruskin
urges, that wealth is not any good to a miser or a spendthrift or a
rogue; that it is often I11th rather than Wealth, if it makes its user
soft and slack and selfish, or proud and cruel. But nevertheless, it is
an object of desire, of human motive; and that is enough for the
economist.

The mistake of the early economists before John S. Mill was in not
recognizing, however, the reaction of man’s possession of wealth upon
his conduct as a producer; how high wages might be remunerative, if they
increased efficiency, and big fortunes wasted if they increased
idleness. We really have to treat two factors, each of which is, in the
language of Mathematics, an implicit function of the other--or, if that
does not make it more clear--each of which acts upon and is acted upon
by the other. The early economists lived in the age when steam engines
and electric telegraphs were great and new achievements, when Chemistry
was being reborn in the atomic theory, and Joule was proving the great
generalization of the conservation of energy. They treated their
subject--man in business--as if he were matter; whereas he has
biological characteristics, and is modifiable and can modify his
environment. Our age, on the contrary, is concerned with the
modification of characteristics under environment. It is the age of
Darwin. Biological evolution is seen to govern the growth of men and
societies; and these, in writings of the dominant school of thinkers
since Herbert Spencer, are seen to follow biological laws of growth. The
Economic man is no exception.

John Stuart Mill begins his chapter defining wealth by remarking that
everyone has a notion sufficiently correct for common purposes, of what
is meant by wealth. This is not his definition; he reaches that later:
it is a reasonable introductory remark. But Ruskin assumes that this is
his definition, and assails him for his lack of scientific precision and
his looseness of thought, as though an astronomer were to begin by
saying that everyone has a notion, sufficient for common purposes, of
what is meant by a star. The criticism is the more unreasonable, when we
find the critic himself doing the very same thing in his famous chapter
on “The Nature of Gothic” in _The Stones of Venice_, in which, at the
opening, the remark occurs: “We all have some notion, most of us a very
determined one, of the meaning of the term Gothic.” Ruskin goes on to
play with the etymology of value;[62] from _valor_ and _valere_, meaning
that which avails towards life and health; and says true wealth is what
tends to life and the increase of its powers, not pearls nor topaz, but
air and light and cleanliness. “To be wealthy is to have a large stock
of useful articles,” say the economists. What, he asks, is to
“have"--has the embalmed body of Carlo Borromeo the golden crosier and
the cross of emeralds on its breast? Has a gold-filled belt the man whom
it drowns, or has he it? Does not “having” depend on the vital power to
use? What, nextly, is “useful”? Persons called wealthy may be inherently
incapable of wealth, mere reservoirs in the stream of national produce,
if not impediments in its course, and so causing “i11th” rather than
“wealth.” Therefore the aim and end of Political Economy is to develop
moral character and capacity for valiantly using valuables, and the
great difficulty is that manly character is apt to suffer from
possessing material wealth and also apt to cast it away. Wealth of
character and wealth of goods tend to undermine one another.

“In a community regulated by laws of supply and demand but protected
from open violence, the persons who become rich are, generally speaking,
industrious, resolute, proud, covetous, prompt, methodical, sensible,
unimaginative, insensitive and ignorant. The persons who remain poor are
the entirely foolish, the entirely wise, the idle, the reckless, the
humble, the thoughtful, the dull, the imaginative, the sensitive, the
well-informed, the improvident, the irregularly and impulsively wicked,
the clumsy knave, the open thief, and the entirely merciful, just and
godly person.”[63]

With one further piece of Ruskin’s teaching on the nature of wealth, I
think that the subject will be clear.

“‘Rich’ is a relative word implying its opposite ‘poor’ as positively as
the word ‘north’ implies its opposite ‘south.’ Men nearly always speak
and write as if riches were absolute, and it were possible by following
certain scientific precepts (Ruskin’s capital error turns up here), for
everybody to be rich. Whereas riches are a power like that of
electricity, acting only through inequalities or negations of itself.
The force of the guinea you have in your pocket depends wholly on the
default of a guinea in your neighbour’s pocket. If he did not want it,
it would be of no use to you; the degree of power it possesses depends
accurately upon the need or desire he has for it--and the art of making
yourself rich, in the ordinary mercantile economist’s sense, is
therefore equally and necessarily the art of keeping your neighbour
poor.”[64]

This is all true; if by rich we understand, as the use of the word in
common practice warrants, relatively wealthy. The possession of money is
the possession of an order upon labour; and it is of no use if there is
no available labour needing it. Ruskin’s illustration is that of a large
landed proprietor who could get no servants to feed his cattle, mine
his gold, plough his corn lands, because no one was in want of his
wages. He must lead a life of severe and common labour to produce even
ordinary comforts, and live in the midst of a waste desert. Therefore,
what is meant by making oneself rich is to produce the maximum
inequality between ourselves and our neighbours.[65]

Ruskin is grievously unfair in saying that that is the object of
mercantile (political) economy; that it is “the science of getting
rich.” Such a statement libels both the science and its expounders; and
it contains, for Ruskin, an extraordinary looseness in the use of words.
There cannot be a science of getting rich, that is an art or a craft.
Science is organized knowledge, not practical faculty to do anything or
get anything.[66]

How wide is the range of Ruskin’s Economy, how practical its objects,
how little of a science it is, how entirely an art, the art of practical
government and production, will be further clear from this statement:

“Political economy (the economy of a State or of citizens), consists
simply in the production, preservation and distribution, at fittest time
and place, of useful or pleasurable things. The farmer who cuts his hay
at the right time, the shipwright who drives his bolts well home in
sound wood, the builder who lays good bricks in well tempered mortar,
the housewife who takes care of her furniture in the parlour and guards
against all waste in her kitchen, and the singer who rightly disciplines
and never overstrains his voice, are all political economists in the
true and final sense; adding continually to the riches and well-being of
the nation to which they belong.”[67]

All this is quite true; but not in any sense a rival study to scholastic
Economics. The great misfortune is that the atmosphere of controversy
and revolt runs through all this glorious gospel, so strong and true in
its teachings, so perverse in its criticisms. The sum of the whole
doctrine is put in memorable words near the close of _Unto This Last_:

“There is no wealth but life. Life, including all its powers of love, of
joy and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the
greatest number of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest
who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has
also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his
possessions, over the lives of others.”[68]

All railing accusation is out of place. The business of the man whom
Ruskin calls the “vulgar economist” is to theorize, his is to edify. The
one is the theoretical engineer and surveyor for the house of the state;
his part in the ὁικονομἱα is that of a professional consultant.
Ruskin is the actual builder; round his guidance sound the clang of
hammer and anvil, the actual stonemasons’ and plumbers’ tools; under his
eye grow in time the ivy and the flowers; but it is not the business of
the architect or surveyor or sanitary engineer to know all about these,
still less to keep a supply of them in his office.

The vastness of the task Ruskin had undertaken is now plain to us and
was pathetic for him. _Munera Pulveris_ contains the definitions of the
new science. No more of it has ever appeared in systematic scientific
form. It is touching to find the inspired artist reformer stopped again
and again in his great attempt to write a complete guide to public
action, by some subject needing special research. “I will treat of this
when I come to” coinage or education, or whatever it might be; ever
promising, ever hoping, if so be by a _tour de force_ of genius he might
storm the city of Mansoul; whereas, it needed all the corps of economic
researchers, mining here and there into truth, making a breach here and
there into the wall of the unknown, working on Parliamentary Returns and
tables of statistics, on records of public registrars and clearing house
reports, by patient inquiry to achieve a little at a time. Ruskin wrote
for thirty years after the epoch-making date of 1860; and it is even now
our task to systematize, if we can, his scattered contributions to
practical Economy.

We may be glad, in John Ruskin’s case, as in that of lesser prophets,
that the greatness of men is measured, not like chains, by their weakest
link, but rather like tides, by the highest they reach.



_CHAPTER V_

_RUSKIN’S RECONSTRUCTION_


The teaching of Ruskin is generally piecemeal and unsystematic, but,
happily, there is one exception to this. In collecting his _Cornhill_
papers for publication as _Unto This Last_ he wrote a Preface
summarizing his practical proposals at their “worst.” They are as
follows:

1. Government Schools, in certain cases compulsory, wherein a child
shall be taught

  (_a_) The laws of health, and healthful exercises.

  (_b_) Habits of gentleness and justice.

  (_c_) The calling by which he is to live.

Compulsory popular education was established ten years after this
demand, and it was long overdue. It was quite central in Mill’s
programme and in that of the school of Cobden and Bright. Only Herbert
Spencer, in obstinate and inflexible individualism, disapproved of State
Schools, and only the Anglican and Catholic Churches, in their own
interest, blocked the way. As to what is taught there, we are slowly
learning Ruskin’s lessons about physical and moral training, and in the
continuation schools and the technical schools are advancing to trade
instruction also; though we are far behind Munich and other German
cities in this regard. More will be found on this on pp. 175-8 in Chap.
VI. The recent orders of the Board of Education distinctly recognize
some difference of subjects for urban, rural and sea-side children.

2. Government workshops for all articles, in fair competition with
private ventures, and turning out nothing that was not genuine and of
good quality.

Broadly speaking, this has not matured. Concerning it we may use
Ruskin’s own words on the whole scheme: “It is only possible to answer
for the final truth of principles, not for the direct success of
plans.”[69] The right attitude, I would suggest, is to develop on
practical lines of utility, and have work done by whatever agency does
it most effectively. This is Ruskin’s drift. It looks as though
municipal milk and beer, municipal houses and coal, as well as heat and
light, municipal theatres and opera, and government transport and
electrical power, were already with us in idea, if not yet in
realization. The method is one for gradual application. Every step will,
very properly, be contested. The experience of the transaction of
business by Government during the Great War has just now strongly
reinforced faith in private enterprise. We should keep an open mind. No
high or final principle comes in, and dogma and prejudice are out of
place.

Hitherto Government has controlled and inspected, rather than itself
carried on the businesses of the country. Very few things are now left
wholly to perfectly free competition. Later on Ruskin gave up Government
workshops in favour of businesses owned and managed by Trade Gilds, thus
anticipating the sequence of public thought in later years. See below in
this Chapter.

3. The unemployed to be taught, or employed at fixed wages, or medically
treated, or coerced to painful labour, according to the need of each
case.

This close pastoral care by public authority has never yet been
realized. It has been left to private philanthropy, guided at one time
by the Elberfeld system as practised in the industrial towns on the
Rhine. As in manufactures the State has guided and inspected business,
rather than conducted it, so its Labour Exchanges and its unemployment
allowance and Insurance against sickness have done much to ease and
diminish the pain of unemployment. But, of course, this is only a stage
in our progress. And the comprehensive lines of Ruskin’s case for the
orphans of Great Business may well be earnestly remembered as a standard
to work towards. We have at any rate left behind us mere reliance on the
terrors of starvation and death as the only spur to industry in the
Great Society, as the present world of vast production and exchange has
been called.[70]

4. Comfort and home for the old and destitute, free from the slur of the
Poor Law.

This has been provided by Old Age Pensions.

Thus Ruskin’s schemes are being or are on the way to be realized, in
quite remarkable detail. How much, uttered by leading writers in 1862,
remains so fresh as these in 1920? Ruskin proclaimed some truths too
early for his peace of mind, but not for the service of men. The
characteristic novelty of the proposals was that they were social, not
political, though written in a period when political reforms occupied
the forefront of progressive thought. They were no doubt a necessary
stage. We should not belittle them in disappointment. For without a
democratic franchise no social reforms could have been achieved.
Ruskin’s proposals are also extremely moderate, and essentially
conservative. He declares his disbelief in “the common Socialist idea of
the division of property,”[71] though, as land is to be in the hands of
those who can use it best, there was to be much compulsory purchase, a
practice with which we are increasingly familiar, for housing, for
allotments, and for small holdings. Nationalization of railways is
definitely part of the programme, as we should expect.[72]

The most radical change concerned Wages. Ruskin declared that wages
should be fixed and steady under the responsibility of either the
Government or the Craft Gilds, and should be independent of the number
of people competing for work. As usual, he blamed the economists because
this was not so in nature, as though physiologists were to blame for
indigestion. But, as mere economics, he understood the doctrine, and
accepted its truth. He says that the cheapening of bread under the
absence of the Corn Laws would cause wages “to fall permanently in
precisely the same proportion.”[73] That is, he accepted the “supply
price” of wages--being the maintenance which the labourer under
competition would accept.

The great issue for human welfare was then, and is now, whether there is
a supply price for wages above the merest starvation line. Labour, so
far, like commodities, has its price determined by the reciprocal action
of the buyers and sellers of it. On the side of demand the buyers cannot
give more than the value of the product of the last labourer they
engage. On the side of supply the labourer would change his trade, or
not have children, or not bring up his children to that trade, or he
would starve and die, unless he received what he considered a
maintenance. This is the supply price. And in any given trade, wages are
fixed at the point where demand and supply are both satisfied. Enough
labourers are employed to make the least valuable worth the required
maintenance and no more. Now the economists, arguing from the phenomena
they saw believed, with Malthus, that there was no decent supply price
for labour in practice, that people would multiply to the very limit of
subsistence. Hence they deduced the terrible doctrine of the Iron Law of
Wages, that wages tend to a starvation level, because they thought first
that food,[74] and afterwards that capital,[75] was fixed at any time,
or increased very slowly. Finally, J. S. Mill taught that fluid capital
or the Wages Fund, that famous centre of controversy, being fixed, the
total capital available for wages had to be divided between an ever
multiplying number of wage earners, some of whom were therefore always
starving.

This treatment of Labour as governed by the same law of supply and
demand as commodities, is the only way it can be treated as subject
matter of a science dealing with the production, distribution and
exchange of wealth. But no one would stop there, shutting his eyes to
the fact that behind the labour stands the labourer, a human being, with
all the spiritual and emotional gifts and needs of a man. Only military
authority treats men so. Even an economist, writing on labour as a
commodity, proceeds to explain how it differs from material
commodities--how slow is its reaction on the side of supply--how high
wages up to a point produce a still higher quality of labour, and so
forth. Business management, also, is a commodity subject to the same
law, but I have never heard that the General Managers of Railway
Companies feel degraded for that reason to the mere level of slaves.

Unluckily the economists, influenced by the poverty that followed the
last great war, which ended in 1815, concluded that the unskilled
labourer would multiply till his children starved. They saw in fact
starvation rampant in England.

This was why Political Economy was called by Carlyle the Dismal Science.
But the economists were no more responsible for it than theologians are
for the Judgment Day, perhaps much less so. Ruskin believed and hated
the doctrine, and so, in fact, was an orthodox Millite. And both he and
Mill had their remedies. Mill recommended education, emigration and
small families. Ruskin appealed to the state or the gilds. In time Mill
came to the same point of view, and died a Socialist. He was able to do
this because he was persuaded by Thornton that the Wages Fund theory did
not hold; that in fact workers produced their own wages, with the help
of some capital to oil the wheels, that is, to fill the gap in time
caused by distribution under the machinery of payment. This occurred in
1869 after _Munera Pulveris_ had been published in _Fraser’s Magazine_
in 1862 and 1863, but before it came out in book form in 1872; and it is
grievous that these two men did not consciously co-operate. Ruskin’s
method of controversy, possibly drove Mill to silence.

The central blast of Ruskin’s attack was against this--ultimately
abandoned--doctrine of hopelessness. I do not mean that we may be quite
cheerful about free competition in wages; for there are departments of
labour so helpless that they cannot obtain a decently living wage.[76]
To meet this, choice of employment is necessary, but cannot always be
found for physically weak or mentally ill-qualified people. The nation
has decided to carry out in specified trades the Ruskinian principle of
the fixed living wage, enforced by the Sweated Industries Acts. Under
these more and more trades may and will come. The economic storm of the
war has broken down the equable course of free competition, and has
caused regulation of wages and prices on all sides. We must not speak as
if this were a normal development either of socialism or of competition.
We have suffered under it as part of the evil of war. The benefits of
competition require time, and a fair field for all forces. There will
still be much done by provision of alternative employment on the land,
by the investment of capital in developing local industries, and
indirectly, by housing, education and temperance reform, to diminish the
remnant of the helpless victims of sweating. Behind these the nation
will probably soon stand, committed to a national minimum in wages and
in hours. Above these government minima stand the various Trades Union
fixed rules. All are Ruskinian,[77] and Mill would rejoice in them too.

A generation ago a national minimum wage had the support of Socialists
of the school of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and of J. A. Hobson.[78] For
a long time it was not orthodox. I remember hearing a Professor of
Political Economy speaking on this subject twice, at an interval of
about ten years. The first time he summed up against it, pointing out
how a minimum tended, in Australian experience, to become a maximum,
with certificates of invalidism or incapacity easily obtainable to
authorize a lower wage. The second time he was for a minimum wage, as
what progressive thinkers hoped for. The steps have, of late, become
rapid. Miners had their wages fixed by the Government after the Coal
Strike of 1912, and again, after the Sankey Commission in 1919. The
Railway and Transport Workers are also under Government protection. An
international Labour Charter is part of the Peace of Versailles, which
must lead to an international minimum. It will be a delicate undertaking
to work it out with any completeness. Within a nation the cost of living
varies from place to place; the value of money rises and falls as
general prices fall or rise. Internationally, between San Francisco, New
York, London, Constantinople, and Yokohama, the differences forbid
uniformity of wage. Nobody can compel an employer to employ anybody
whose work results in no profit. Some people exist who are not worth a
minimum wage, unless it is too low to be acceptable. There will have to
be provision for these. Pensions for Old Age and invalidity will assume
larger proportions. The race will have to worry out this complex tangle
of man with his environment. What is clear is that we have reached the
Ruskinian standpoint about it.

_Fors Clavigera_ is the most remarkable of the writings of Ruskin. He
who has read _Fors_, or a large part of it, knows Ruskin, and if he
loves and reveres the author, has become a Ruskinian. But without
reading _Fors_ no man or woman can become a Ruskinian. In it you become
intimate with the man. He talks to you like a friend, button-holes you
very much as Socrates did, invites you to laugh with him, and join in
laughs at himself, tells you all his troubles, and the causes of the ups
and downs of his spirits, tells you of his loneliness and his hopes and
intentions, shows you his accounts every month, tells you where he has
lost money, and to whom he has given it away, lets you see his letters
and his replies to them, and holds you, by the personal power of him,
while he pours vials of prophetic denunciation upon Society only to be
equalled in the pages of the Hebrew Prophets; and then clinches it all
with “Mind you, I mean every word of it; no exaggeration here.”

_Fors_ is a book--a message:--it is often playful in style, the matter
all scattered. The subject changes from page to page; nothing in it can
be referred to without that Queen of Indexes which accompanies it: but
the unity of its subject is in the unity of the author. You carry on an
idea, cropping up under all sorts of irrelevancies and chance
illustrations--and you carry on certain jokes too, or humorous
allusions, as we all do in common life. This miscellany, I am persuaded,
will attract readers longer than the stately symmetry of _Modern
Painters_, or the laborious detail of the _Stones of Venice_. Who but
Ruskin could have brought thus out of his treasury things new and old?

We shall look in vain for a completely worked out system of business and
legislation in Ruskin’s writings. His Utopia is delightfully worked up
here and there in detail, but it has great gaps; it often seems to raise
more difficulties than it settles; and it is not always consistent with
itself.

Indeed, one could not expect completeness or real mastery of the
problem, either from the man or from the nature of the subject. From the
man, because the prophet and the practical administrator are rarely
combined. Comte went into detail, and we do not much value the
Positivist detail. The prophet is the man with the clear vision and hot
heart. The practical administrator must sit on committees and keep
secretaries, and meet deputations; he must check accounts and hold
dinner parties. What we desire is that practical men should give ear to
the prophet.

Secondly, the subject is too vast and complicated for complete
treatment. Great as has been the volume and secure the conviction of the
attacks on our present social system, how very little in the way of
stable fabric exists to-day in confessed substitution for it. Socialist
and Communist colonies have failed through their principles being in
advance of the practice of the men who had to pioneer their course. Of
the thirty or forty whose history has been collected, most have broken
up, a few with profit to the members, but most with loss. Religious
communities have, of course, shown the greatest tenacity. The Shakers
are now diminishing and discouraged, though they own some of the richest
land in America, and are commercially connected with a valuable property
besides, known as Mother Siegel’s Syrup. The Doukhobors from Russia now
settled in the far West of Canada, have saved themselves by their
communism under persecution. They again are bound by a mighty religious
bond. But many are being absorbed by the society around, and their
primitive faith in their leader Peter Verigin as an incarnation of God,
will hardly survive Canadian education. We will not, then, expect to see
a complete reconstruction of society. Ruskin’s is most fully worked out
in _Time and Tide_: but _Fors_ is thickly scattered with it too.

Roughly, then, and in the large, Regulation and Co-operation, rather
than Competition and Economic freedom, are to be the guiding principles.
That is, Ruskin is a Socialist. But he is no revolutionary nor divider
up of property. He desired all things to be gradual, and was too wise to
suppose that anything sweeping could be done at once, or indeed very
much of any kind for a long time. To his private correspondents in
_Fors_ the advice was always given to stay where they were, and do as
well as they could what they had in hand. Ruskin, again, is a Socialist
of the aristocratic variety. He believed in graded ranks, and in people
staying in the class they were born in. He did not say that everybody
was equal. He was also of the earnestly religious type of Socialist.
When I add that he considered that he and Carlyle were the only two
Conservatives left in England, and that he was a Tory of the type of
Scott and Homer, I may perhaps have succeeded in leaving my readers
fairly confused in mind: as every one who tries to classify Ruskin will
become.

As to Wealth, Ruskin proposes that there shall be a legislative upper
limit to a man’s property; and that those whose superfluity is skimmed
off by law should have titles instead and be employed in public service.
As noted again in the chapter on Usury later, there are various ways of
securing this: by steeply graduating the Income Tax and the Death Duties
at the upper end, or by limiting the legal right of bequest, either by
saying that you must not bequeath more than a certain sum to one person,
or that a person must not inherit more than a certain total sum from all
sources. These startling innovations would no doubt put an effective
check on accumulation, if the State succeeded in fighting the ingenuity
of the lawyers.

All interest on money he entirely forbids. This I deal with in Chapter
VII.

All land is to be bought by the State from the landlords, and the
aristocracy, living on the Government annuities thus created, are to
become the legislators and leaders of the people. I don’t know whether
he knew them very well. At any rate these annuities appear to me to be
of the nature of interest.

War is to be managed by personal encounters between some of the military
aristocrats and the aristocrats of the enemy, to save butchery of
peasants and much needless devastation. A kind of international Rugby
football match without referees might meet the case--where the honour of
England was really at stake. It is a simple suggestion; but soberly
Ruskin loathed war--particularly wars for conquest and all modern war by
machinery and for the benefit of capitalists. This is shown in Chapter
VIII.

Our factory system and the crowding into towns he detested; though he
gives us no practical suggestions towards ending it except that most
steam power should be abandoned--not quite all. There is a curious
prophecy too about electricity superseding steam and smoke. We are
beginning on hopeful lines here with Mond gas, central electrical power
stations, and Garden Cities--if only we could and would compel our
factories to stop making smoke, the greatest curse of the landscape.
This is treated more fully in Chapter IX.

Our Government must also take heed to all means of keeping our
population in the country.

Population Ruskin deals with fantastically by permitting marriages only
to young men and young women after passing a suitable examination in
business or domestic qualifications. He would provide them, on marriage,
with an income for seven years from the State. If they had a private
income beyond this minimum it must accumulate; so that all young couples
start life on the same standard of expenditure. This is the most drastic
of his regulations, and the most out of reach.[79]

Under land tenure from the State each person was to hold no more than he
could properly make use of--a system of permanent peasant proprietors,
that is, at a quit rent;--the land inalienable in title, and to descend
by primogeniture.

We have also the somewhat obscure remark[80] that bread, water, and the
roof over his head must be tax (i.e. rent) free to every man. Methods
of administration are to be left to settle themselves. Also, “every man
is to build his own house to his mind, and to have a mind to build it
to.”

As a system this leaves large gaps. What are to be the exact duties of
the aristocratic annuitant landowners, and who are they to be? There is
an echo of Plato’s “Guardians” in their position and duties: indeed they
seem very like in their functions to those hierarchical beings. It may
have been from Plato too that Ruskin learnt to emphasize the degradation
of continuous mechanical work, particularly that which is connected with
the mechanical use of fire.

The Church is, as we have seen in Chapter III, to be exactly on the
Quaker model. No one is to be paid for preaching. The preachers are to
earn their living like other men; and the distinction between clergy and
laity is to be absolutely done away. “Of clergymen’s usual work,
admonition, theological demonstration, and the like I shall want very
little done indeed, and that little done for nothing! for I will allow
no man to admonish anybody, until he has previously earned his own
dinner by more productive work than admonition.” The lesson on humility
to religious persons in _Time and Tide_ is very amusing.[81]

Turning to the business world, the deadliest war of Society would be
against occult stealing, by making bad goods, by adulteration, and
passing off sham articles. These practices would be guarded against by
the formation of trade guilds. Ruskin enumerates in Letter LXXXIX of
_Fors_ twenty-one trades. The men of each trade are to form themselves
into a guild, buy land and buildings, regulate prices and qualities, and
become, in fact, capitalist employers. Retail dealers are to be salaried
officers under the guild. Such is the proposal of _Fors_ of 1879, and
_Time and Tide_ of 1867. In _Unto This Last_ of 1860 the Government is
to have the workshops, not private guilds. Ruskin began to think his
later plan of private guilds more possible as years went on. Also, and
always, property is to be acquired by the guilds by honest payment and
voluntary bargains. It is very striking how prophetic these schemes are
of the proposals now known as Guild Socialism, treated in the next
chapter, at present the most popular form of socialistic reconstruction.
They are, indeed, a sketch of the very thing.

Competition, outside the guilds or Government shops, is always
allowed--“as a safety valve for outlet of irrepressible vice.” He
believed in the cutaneous and curable eruption of such, rather than in
forcing it into the system of the body politic--a wise and cautious
idea, in no way that of a blind optimist. Another reason for this
permission of outside competition was to provide scope for erratic
ingenuity and original genius, and to conserve individual initiative;
also to protect the rights of foreigners trading here. There is also
much other sensible elasticity of arrangement hinted at. Honesty,
truthfulness, freedom from oppression, some plan by which all the good
national elements could become availing instead of being neglected and
choked off, these are the objects of his trade guilds. The difficulty of
foreign competition at low prices he does not touch, except to
anticipate for a far future a similar international guild system.

One can easily see that increased facilities for combination are putting
it into the power of combines and trusts to fix qualities and prices in
a way the men of 1867 would never have expected. Is it beyond hope that
what combinations of capital and management can do, labour combinations
may do, for more public ends? Then indeed out of the eater will have
come forth meat. “The lion and the bear shall feed,” and the capitalist
shall dine like the labourer. “They shall not hurt nor destroy” in all
my holy workshops and markets.

One of the most startling, but at the same time, most thought-compelling
proposals for the ideal State are Mr. Ruskin’s Bishops. The έπίσκοπος of
the New Testament was an Overseer, a man who looked after the members of
the Early Church, the agent of their relief, and the supervisor of their
conduct. This order of men Ruskin proposes to declericalize and to
municipalize. The preaching, we shall remember, is to be separated from
pastoral care, and to be done gratuitously by unofficial ministers. This
leaves no link between the State and the family; even the action of the
Fatherland as a father, now afforded by the State clergy, being done
away with. Therefore, over every fifty or a hundred families there is to
be elected, for life, a Bishop, who is to be a friendly counsellor, and
to keep a record of all notable events--a much extended public
registrar. All exceptional treatment which special circumstances may
render desirable, any mitigation of ordinary law, is arranged through
him. Where law is to be so pervasive, some cushion for its impact would
certainly be necessary. He bears to the Government the relation which
the Charity Organisation Society bears to the Poor Law Guardians, or an
Inebriate Home to the Jail, or (in theory) Equity to Common Law. Thus
the terrible loneliness and neglect of the poor, and haunts of
undiscovered vice, would no longer be possible. The whole episcopal
action was to be elastic, the methods patient, gentle, not compulsory,
and not intrusive. The Bishops were to be paid officers, and they had to
report to a higher officer called a Duke (_Time and Tide_, XIII).

We now approach the question of national leadership. So great was
Ruskin’s distrust of the People, his hatred of Liberty and Equality,
that he fell back upon our Aristocracy, commonplace as he knew it to be,
for the power of governance. He is not so far out of our current
national habit. We know well that any good, hardworking peer, baronet or
landed magnate of good family, has at once a favourable hearing, and
possesses by birth an open door to the confidence of the people; and he
has only to show that he deserves it, to maintain it with ease. We
democrats love a lord. So the Home Office and police work, also the
Judgeships and the officering of the citizen army are to be the work of
the present landed gentry; the careful husbanding of the nation’s
resources in a glorified Board of Trade is to be the work of the present
kings of business. The Education Department and the now nonexistent
Artistic Department, the Board of Works, together with the few necessary
Doctors, and the Musicians, are the third department of upper-class
work, to be undertaken by the professional classes. It will be
remembered that there are to be no hired soldiers or clergy and very few
lawyers.

For the realization of this Utopia, no violence is to be used. As a
prophet with an ethical gospel he entirely distrusted methods of
physical force, as leaving you in reality just the men you were before,
only damaged by the conflict in mind and person and estate. Nor did he,
as a Conservative and a believer in continuity, look with favour or hope
on a general confiscation bill, abolishing rent and interest. The whole
thing had to be done by converting the upper classes, those classes
whose glory is in living in comfort and pride served by the labour of
others, and whose alienation from the multitude is graven deep into
their characters by every one of their cherished habits. We have seen
that the landlord would become an annuitant, the parson transformed, the
solicitor and the barrister nearly wiped out. Many merchants, most
bankers and stockbrokers and all shareholders in banks, if and when
interest is abolished, would find themselves without the profits on
which, it is to be feared, much of their happiness depends. Some of
these persons would become public officers, living on salaries and
earning them. Manufacturers would become profit sharers, and be invited
to join a Guild. Doubtless the liquor interest would find that it had a
stern master, though but little detailed allusion to it is made, and
prohibition is not intended.

If you have ever tried to convince a man by some highly abstruse, or at
any rate, long and intricate process of thought, of truths or proposals
which upset his whole career, blighted his interests, and wrote him down
a useless and pernicious person--if, for instance, you have explained
the wickedness and folly of Protection to a friend from Pennsylvania, or
the theoretical righteousness of Home Rule to a friend from Belfast, or
the innate errors of Vivisection to a physiologist, or discoursed on
Homœopathy to your own medical man, you will be able to foresee the
blank look of polite indifference with which Ruskin’s schemes would be
likely to be received by the Marquis of B. or by the distinguished
directors of your bank. Why am I not to make cotton look like silk? will
be asked by certain very excellent Lancashire firms. Is shoddy not to
continue its useful, if humble career? is the cry of certain parts of
the West Riding; and some of the metallic business of Birmingham would
be a cause of much searching of heart. And there is not a retired old
lady living in her bower of roses from the Lake District to Penzance
whose peace of mind and perhaps nourishment of body would not, if
interest were truly abolished, cease. I always notice that reformers who
would abolish interest do not explain what they would do with the large
class of ladies of all ages, and the smaller class of elderly men who,
after all, do constitute the greater part of the technically idle class,
and who are totally unable to earn a living; since neither the arts of
dress nor of graceful conversation have a market value.

It must be plain to us that any wholesale conversion and sudden
awakening of the social conscience in Ruskin’s direction is not to be
expected. Neither the intellectual conviction, nor the moral power to
carry it out if formed, will be produced except in a few instances, here
and there. The astonishment and delight with which we hear of the doings
of exceptional employers show how rare they are. Every year, of recent
years, has seemed darker and darker to some of us, in noting the
treatment of public affairs by the wealthy, and the extent to which
“Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind.”

Nor is it possible to an employer, even if intellectually convinced and
morally sound, to raise his wages much above the rate paid by his
competitors, to avoid drawing from the business wherewithal to pay
interest on capital, nor, generally, to improve quality, with or without
improving price.

We must fall back on legislation, on democratic conviction expressed by
the organ of the national will, to bring about any portion of this
scheme. We shall have to move all together, if we move at all. Take a
comparative trifle, trifling compared to these large proposals--the
weekly half-holiday. This can only be taken by all or none of a given
trade in a given town; or take the Bank Holidays, popular benefits only
to be won on the floor of the House of Commons, and which cost so much
effort that a certain worthy banker has been canonized for his labours
in obtaining St. Lubbock’s Day. Yet I am of Ruskin’s mind thus far--that
any growth of an enlightened moral sentiment will most easily permeate
the voting masses from individuals of the educated classes.

Ruskin cherished no delusions about it. He says: “You need not think
that even if you obtained a majority of representatives in the existing
Parliament, you could immediately compel any system of business, broadly
contrary to that now established by custom. If you could pass laws
to-morrow, wholly favourable to yourselves, as you might think, because
unfavourable to your masters, and to the upper classes of society, the
only result would be that the riches of the country would at once leave
it, and you would perish in riot and famine. Be assured that no great
change for the better can ever be easily accomplished, or quickly; nor
by impulsive ill-regulated effort, nor by bad men; nor even by good men,
without much suffering.”[82]

The scheme as a whole has never been systematized, nor worked out in
detailed proposals. Still less has it been hinged on to our present
social structure. It is a prophetic forecast, an inspiration of genius;
it is a bow of glorious hue set in the clouds. When Ruskin wrote his
economics the view was that by each man doing the best for himself the
general good was automatically best advanced--an unseen hand behind
human activities arranged the world’s welfare with nothing but
individual selfishness to do it with.

We no longer accept this as a complete account of the matter. We
recognize that that would be a wild-wood kind of a cosmic order; and
that under it human affairs would be left to the same kind of governance
as that of the forest and the jungle. The wolf pack and the wild bramble
are all very well in their scale and their place; but for humanity this
unrestrained individual luxuriance, with its terrible cost and waste, is
now felt by us to be only a first approximation to society. It is the
point whence we begin, not the goal we aim for. It is safe and stable as
a foundation; it cannot be upset or overthrown, for it is actually
itself the ground; and there is nothing to overthrow. Guilds,
Monopolies, Trusts, also Governments and Charities are built upon it to
regulate it; and they grow, and in time may decay and die, leaving the
jungle of free competition to overrun once more the painful clearings.
But out of the wilds men have in fact made their lawns and gardens,
their orchards and their fields of wheat; they have built them palaces
and cities which are permanent and stable enough, though not
everlasting. The higher law of civilization is successfully holding at
bay the wild tendencies. The millions of stray seeds, the storms of wind
and crackings of frost, if let alone, would in time reduce a watering
place like Scarborough to a green cliff side; still Scarborough exists
and will exist, and justify its existence. Similarly there are
limitations, orderly arrangements, which may be put upon the wild nature
of economic freedom; and we may make a better world thereby. We all know
how much is accepted already in the way of civilized restraint. When
Parliament is free to attend to home affairs almost every Act is a
regulation or limitation of individual freedom, or it is the taking up
by Government of what had been previously left to the individual. The
long list of municipal and imperial activities must be too familiar to
need repetition here. We are indeed rushing rapidly in that direction.
Can we go no further? Are we necessarily at the end just here?

I will try to outline in the following chapter a few ways in which we
may. That is, we will test Ruskin by the changes of the last half
century and those which are looming near; and see how much of his
teaching abides our question.



_CHAPTER VI_

_RUSKIN’S ECONOMICS TO-DAY_


It is well known that none of the proposals in the Preface to _Unto This
Last_, summarized above, nor all of them together, satisfy the ideas of
the most vigorous reformers of the moment. Nothing less than the
abolition of all production and distribution for individual profit is
believed by many earnest and experienced men to go to the root of our
social diseases. On the other hand, State Socialism has fallen into
discredit. The experience of Government officials in war time has taken
all the gas out of that particular experimental balloon.

Guild Socialism is now the favourite form. Under this the government of
the country is to be twofold, from top to bottom. Guilds of producers
are to own and run businesses, having eliminated the capitalist as such,
and are to be organized into local, county, and national guilds of the
workers in that business. Then all the national guilds unite in a
Parliament of producers, who govern wages, and, I presume, the import
and export trade. Over against this stand our present geographical
constituencies and our present Parliament, which is the nation organized
as consumers. The State, represented by the present geographically
elected Parliament, is to remain supreme, is to be the ultimate owner of
the property used by the Guilds, with the right to tax it, by a quit
rent. The Guilds are to be the taxable units.[83]

Rent, interest and profits are to be abolished. No provision for
compensation is part of the proposal; but no doubt that would depend
upon circumstances, and upon what could be arranged. It would also give
rise to much difference of opinion among the advocates of the new order.
And much would depend on whether it came gradually and peacefully, by
consent--or after a revolutionary general strike--or, again, after civil
war. One hears of an intention to respect life interests, but no more.
Clearly this issue will subject our people to a political test which
may be beyond their strength, and may, if we are not guided by justice
and mercy, lead to a generation of violence and the ruin of many hopes.

The ideals behind the movement are noble--to give the workman a
proprietary interest in his work, to break down the pernicious
distribution of wealth which economic freedom has brought about, to
bring up a healthy and well-bred race, not a well-bred class only, to
put public service in place of profit as the motive for labour; to
banish the wretched insecurity of unemployment, and take away the bored
life of the idle rich; to use the surplus wealth of industry for the
education of the whole people and for a full life for all. Nothing less
than this is the guerdon of success.

If the Guild is to guarantee a wage to all its workers, well and ill,
under good trade and bad, in defiance of changes in demand due to
fashion or invention, or to changes in weather or to foreign imports,
there will certainly have to be great powers in the Guild for the
transfer of labour from where it is not wanted to where it is. Also,
seeing that only a certain number of workers are wanted in the
pleasanter occupations, some authority in the guilds will have to
assign their duty to all labourers, instead of leaving the choice to
competition with the sharp tooth of hunger behind it.

The coercion of the idle workman will be quite a large task; for
slackness cannot be summarily dealt with as now by dismissal. It is such
rocks of human frailty that will be the danger to the navigation of any
ordered system. Are all childless women to be made to work for guild
wages? Are married and unmarried men to be paid alike? Is any saving to
be permitted? What machinery will determine prices, when demand and
supply are denied their free play? It is not the place of this book to
answer these questions or to pronounce a final opinion. It is enough to
see that opinion is strongly tending in this direction, and that it is
in the sequence of _Fors Clavigera_.

That this is, however, the direction of advance, one is led to believe,
from the existence of a halfway house. There is in every movement always
the moderate mass and the progressive vanguard, and they sometimes turn
their guns heartily upon one another. The moderate proposal, the rival
to Guild Socialism, is that of the Whitley Councils for bringing in the
present capitalist employers and their workmen as collaborators in the
conduct of businesses, and as joint constituents of a trade Parliament.

The Builders’ Parliament,[84] or “Industrial Council for the Building
Industry,” was the forerunner of the Whitley Councils, but is on more
thoroughgoing guild lines. Mr. Malcolm Sparkes, a young director of a
carpentry and cabinet-making business in Willesden, was mixed up as an
employer in a disastrous building strike in 1914. Hopeless of any
solution by hostile and suspicious bodies of organized masters and
organized men, never meeting except as opponents, and working by warfare
and the balance of power, he conceived the idea of combined councils,
representing both sides, meeting periodically to consider the well-being
of the industry. Such bodies were not to deal with disputes, but could
often avoid them and remove their causes. Above all they would provide a
friendly atmosphere. He persuaded the men’s organizations first, and
induced them to approach the masters, who responded willingly; and after
due debates, and two years’ permeation of opinion in all the bodies
concerned, the Builders’ Parliament was constituted. At its sixth
quarterly meeting in August, 1919, it passed by an overwhelming majority
a report, called the Foster Report, under which masters would become
paid officials and capitalists would receive a fixed interest. Mr.
Sparkes and the builders, therefore, are using their united organization
to prepare the way for the Guild arrangement, and are favourable to it.
They have offered the labour to build some thousands of houses to the
Corporation of Manchester, if the latter will supply the capital and
take the business risk. But the Whitley Council movement has had a wider
development, if a less advanced one.

Mr. J. H. Whitley, Chairman of Committees in the House of Commons, and
Chairman of a Government Sub-Committee on the relations of employers and
employed, read an article by Mr. Sparkes on his scheme in the _Venturer_
for December, 1916, and asked him to prepare a memorandum for him in
detail, and to record his progress to date. This memorandum became the
basis of the Whitley Report. The Government adopted it and organized
under it the Whitley Councils. The day after Mr. Sparkes’s memorandum
reached the printers the author was sent to prison as a conscientious
objector to military service. He was a Quaker; he had refused an
exemption as a works manager in a controlled business; he had resigned
his directorship rather than do war work; and now in defiance of an Act
of Parliament which granted exemption, the blind hand of the Tribunals
and the War Office could do nothing better with this young patriot than
to keep him in gaol for two years. He was liberated a little before the
others because the King happened to ask for the author of the Whitley
Report. This kind of thing gives pause to one’s hopes of better times
coming out of the action of the present militarist states. To all these
proposals Ruskin ought to be recognized as the idealist forerunner. His
guilds of craftsmen, though differently founded, are very much like Mr.
Cole’s. The same social message which Oxford sent through Ruskin from
Christ Church and Corpus, she now sends through a Fellow of Magdalen. As
the consummation of the idealist approaches, it becomes necessary to
work the ideas out, and people will listen to the details, indeed will
fiercely question them, and demand something practical. But in the
history of economic thought, should these ideas become ultimately
fruitful, a greater place should be found for the author of _Fors_ than
has yet been awarded to him by our writers on Economics. The chief
differences between the modern scheme and that of forty years ago is
that Ruskin would confiscate nothing, and would not demand, would even
object to, a labour monopoly in the hands of the Guilds, which Mr. Cole
declares to be a necessity, without which a Guild is not a Guild. It
will be for our successors fifty years hence to say on which side wisdom
lay.

On one point the age has gone beyond Ruskin. For good or evil we know we
have nothing to trust to but Democracy. From the ugliness and
gullibility of the democracy the secluded artist shrank, living in
beauty and luxury at Oxford or Venice or by the Lake of Coniston. There
was excuse, and there is still much excuse, for men of little faith. The
democracy can be played upon and excited to war: its ruling puppets dare
not take the drink from it even in war time. It has “demanded,” as
economists say, our conscienceless and sensational newspapers, and it
loves to read them. It needs much education, and particularly it needs
what Ruskin hoped for from Education--character and conduct; first,
grace and health and beauty of life; and, as chief intellectual prize,
a relentless love of truth. Would that everybody would refuse to buy
again a paper that had once deceived them, or to vote for a politician
once proved untrustworthy.

Reformers, forgetting the dead weight they have to shift, turn their
guns on one another. Socialists seem to be most scornful of Liberalism,
and particularly of those employers who are generous and
public-spirited.

It must be emphasized that Ruskin was an aristocrat in temperament. In
fact he repudiated the idea of an equality which did not, he declared,
exist. His sections in _Munera Pulveris_ against equal voting and on
“natural slavery"--I suppose learnt from Aristotle’s _Politics_--are
clear on this.[85] He did not support negro slavery, but his interests
were chiefly taken up with opposing economic slavery at home, or
reserving it for the fit people. The whole passage must be read to be
understood.

It is now in 1920 nearly fifty years since _Fors Clavigera_ began to
come out, and the outlines of St. George’s Guild were drawn. Those who
in that decade found a new inspiration and delight in discipleship to
him, are now growing elderly; the glory of the early time when Ruskin’s
genius was irradiating the pages of _Fors_ with the hope of a kingdom of
God to be raised within the kingdom of this world, was in the days of
youth, in the spring of aspiration and a not easily bounded hope. We
nourished our hearts on godlike food; and we owe our Master an
inextinguishable debt. It is often doubtless a thought full of sadness
that the tender grace of a day that is dead will never come back to us,
in the sober light of long experience in the realm of the commonplace.
Our task now is, to gather up in our maturity that which abides; for our
days are passing, and though the growth of the kingdom has not been all
that we might have hoped, its spirit must still be handed on, and fixed,
so far as we can fix it, in the permanent habits of man.

We Ruskinians are often called sentimental. But it is not sentimental to
keep sentiment in its proper place and to have a sane and well directed
emotion at our beck when something has to be done. “Sentiment” means
ill-directed emotion which slops over. Loyalty is not inconsistent with
criticism. It is essential that that which is merely temporary or
fanciful in the instructions which run through the pages of _Fors_
should not be insisted upon for ever. Those pages contain many quaint
directions untested by experience.

The Guild of St. George was intended to be a company of people who would
bind themselves to live in a healthy way, doing harm to no man and no
landscape, cultivating land by hand or water power, and contributing to
the public and educational work of the Guild, at first, one-tenth of
their income; but as this was too much for most people, the amount was
left elastic.[86]

The Creed of St. George is a noble document. It had to be signed by
every member of the Guild.[87]

1. I trust in the Living God, Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and
earth, and of all things and creatures, visible and invisible.

I trust in the kindness of His Law and the goodness of His work.

2. I trust in the nobleness of human nature, in the majesty of its
faculties, the fulness of its mercy, and the joy of its love.

I will strive to love my neighbour as myself, and even when I cannot,
will act as if I did.

3. I will labour, with such strength and opportunity as God gives me,
for my own daily bread: and all that my hand finds to do, I will do with
my might.

4. I will not deceive, nor cause to be deceived, any human being for my
gain or pleasure; nor hurt, nor cause to be hurt, any human being for my
gain or pleasure: nor rob, nor cause to be robbed, any human being for
my gain or pleasure.

5. I will not kill or hurt any living creature needlessly, nor destroy
any beautiful thing, but will strive to save and comfort all gentle
life, and guard and perfect all natural beauty upon the earth.

6. I will strive to raise my own body and soul daily into higher powers
of duty and happiness; not in rivalship or contention with others, but
for the help, delight and honour of others, and for the joy and peace of
my own life.

7. (On loyalty to the laws.)

8. (On loyalty to the Guild.)

As an organization this little realm within the realm came to very
little. It needed advertisement, propagandism, somebody to preach it,
and to organize it. The prophet at Brantwood wrote about it to the then
very limited audience of _Fors_, and there propaganda ended. There were
about forty-two Companions of St. George altogether at one time; and the
Master was autocratic and irregular through ill health. Some land at
Abbeydale, Sheffield, was taken, and a settlement of Socialists
attempted without success. George Baker presented a woodland tract of
fifteen acres at Bewdley; Mrs. Talbot some cliff-like land and cottages
at Barmouth; and a small holding on the Yorkshire coast at Claughton,
near Whitby, was acquired. The land cultivation came to very little.

The land at Abbeydale is now a successful market garden with a
residence, let to a tenant in the usual way. A house has been built
within recent years on the land at Bewdley, and part, if not all, of it
is at last in cultivation by a Liverpool couple tired of town life. Mrs.
Talbot’s representative manages the cottages at Barmouth on the lines of
an ordinary good landlord. We have sold the bit of Yorkshire moorland,
long troublesome. After delays and legal difficulties, George Baker, a
Quaker alderman of Birmingham, who had been co-trustee of the
properties, and had borne much of the business burden of it from the
beginning, was made Master, and a few new members were enrolled by
invitation. The Guild has held of late years a number of annual
meetings, at Oxford, Coniston, Sheffield, Bewdley, London, Manchester,
Liverpool and Birmingham, which were delightful social occasions, and
which transacted the business of the properties, and made grants from
the income, which, apart from subscriptions, is between one and two
hundred pounds a year, mostly representing Ruskin’s own gifts. The
grants go as a rule to literary, agricultural or other purposes on the
Master’s lines. On the death of Mr. Baker the Mastership was accepted by
Mr. George Thomson, of Huddersfield, the forerunner, under Ruskin’s
guidance, of the profit-sharing movement in this country. He resigned,
through failing health, in 1920, and Mr. H. E. Luxmoor, of Eton, was
appointed. Mr. William Wardle, of 4 Olive Lane, Wavertree, Liverpool, is
the Hon. Sec. Two members represent the Guild on the Committee of the
Sheffield Corporation which has charge of the Ruskin Museum in
Meersbrook Park. This Museum is the property of the Guild on permanent
loan to the Corporation of Sheffield who maintain it. It is indeed among
the Guild properties the one really valuable concrete survival of the
labour and enthusiasm of the founder. It is one of the very lovely
things of the whole world, with its concentrated charm and delicate
fineness.

These details about the present day of small things, about this remnant
of an ancient hope, are not themselves important, but may not be without
interest to some of the many thousand readers of _Fors Clavigera_. Those
letters are full more of promise and of postponement than of achievement
or permanently established method; and the rather wilful and fantastic
adventures of a mind that was seldom at rest, often overflow into the
monthly budget without as much repression as a sober systematizer would
have exercised, but with endless delight.

In the early hopeful days, when there floated before Ruskin’s
imagination the conception of an influential and numerous body of
Companions of the Guild, comprising the moral and intellectual
aristocracy of the country, he laid his plans on large lines. In the
Master’s Report for 1881 he wrote that he expected “the Guild to extend
its operations over the Continent of Europe and number its members
ultimately by myriads”; which in the mouth of a Greek scholar means
accurately by tens of thousands. He instructed the Companions to read no
newspapers until he should be able to found a newspaper fit for them to
read, an instruction which his most devout follower has never obeyed.
Moreover there was to be an authorized list of books which alone might
be read, of which _Bibliotheca Pastorum_ was the first part. This is
perhaps the most erratic of all the proposals which crossed his mind.

He also criticized the coinage of the country, and insisted that there
should be under the rule of St. George sovereigns called ducats, of pure
gold, a metal which is of itself quite unsuited for use as coinage, and
needs to be hardened by alloy before it is fit for the purposes of the
mint. Then the shilling was to be called a florin and was to be divided
into ten pence. This copying of the coins of Florence in the middle
ages, which as Ruskin once said to me, gave her merchants credit in the
time of Edward I, cannot be considered seriously; indeed, these fanciful
commands can only be matter for regret. There can be but one coinage in
a country, even if the Guild of St. George had become a large
institution. So late as 1884 Mr. Ruskin told a party of us at Brantwood
that the St. George’s Company was going to issue coins of pure gold.

Rents, payable of course to the State, were to be one-tenth of the
produce. Now rents cannot with any justice be settled that way. The
farmer who farms poor land should be as well off and get as good a
return for his labour as he who farms rich land. Under ordinary
competition things turn out that way. All farmers in theory, and
approximately in practice, receive the same return for labour and
capital applied to land, and the margin goes to the landlord as rent.

Ruskin’s system is known as the metayer system, only that half, not
one-tenth of, the profits usually go to the landlord. It is an
old-fashioned, primitive, and uneconomic system, and is used in Italy,
Portugal, on the Danube, in Russia, and over about one-seventh of
France. At the time of the French Revolution, Arthur Young found
seven-eighths of France managed in this way. It is suited for small
holdings; but it discourages intensive culture, for it would be no use
for a metayer tenant to spend £1 in increasing his product by £2, if
half of the £2 went to the landlord. Ruskin liked it because it made a
friendly co-operation between landlord and tenant. There was never any
clash of interests, and the tenant was never under real hardship. It is
morally a much more attractive plan. It bars any keen competition
between tenants and it leads to permanency of tenure.

Throughout Ruskin’s proposals for reform we shall nearly always find in
each something fanciful and dainty, but impracticable--a sort of pretty
decoration tacked on in gaiety of heart, in the spirit of Gothic
ornamentation. But if we knock off his little pinnacles, and deny
ourselves the glow of his stained glass windows, we shall generally find
a commodious and serviceable erection of constructive reform left. In
fact, he turns out to have been on the main stream of progress, though
pleading all the time that he was harking back to a happier past. His
agricultural and business proposals contained fruitful elements,
appearing ahead of their time; events from many sides have proved how
illuminating his suggestions were.

Ruskin, as we have noted, would limit all incomes at the top by slicing
off the superfluity and giving a title instead. In occult ways,
unfortunately, peerages and baronetcies and knighthoods do come about by
the sacrifice of cash; and in more open and creditable form the
graduated income tax, the super-tax, and the steeply rising death
duties are partial measures in the same direction.

There is perhaps nothing more fanciful in Ruskin’s reconstruction of
Society than his marriage regulations, laid down in _Time and Tide_, and
mentioned in the last chapter. We have not yet put Cupid into harness to
this extent, but the popular interest and concern about the propagation
of the unfit and the feeble-minded, and in general the attention which
is being paid to heredity and the interest in eugenics, are all in the
direction laid down by Ruskin in a thorough-going shape, fearless as the
schemes of childhood. By feeding school children and by doctoring them
the State supplements the weakness of the homes. In many unfamiliar
forms the work of St. George goes on.

But in his day thought and practice in Social Reform were comparatively
uninstructed by experience. One is reminded of his own phrase about
Cimabue and Giotto. They uttered “the burning messages of prophecy by
the stammering lips of infants.” He goes straight for his object without
fear or hesitation, as an inexperienced child will toddle across a
crowded street, unfearing because unknowing about the motor cars.
Ruskin, for instance, would set the unemployed to reclaim waste lands.
To which of us has not that thought come? Here are the men wanting work;
here is the land wanting workers. Let us put them together. But
experience has shown that the dour nature of the unoccupied land, and
the frequently dour nature of the unoccupied men, render such schemes
generally hopeless, and at times even scandalous, failures. Land and men
are unoccupied because they are hard to occupy, and by putting together
waste land and waste men you only double the difficulty of the task.
When good workers might make something of bad land, or bad workers of
good land, bad workers on bad land are hopeless. Some years ago in the
House of Commons in the debate on the Right to Work Bill, Mr. Burns
explained amid general agreement the complete failure of relief works,
and their tendency rather to increase the evil and waste public
resources. Why is the land out of cultivation? For no other reason than
that it does not pay to cultivate it. The return will not give a
maintenance and pay taxes. We may leave rent out, for landlords would
rather have their lands cultivated for no rent than let them lie a waste
of weeds. And why are the men not at work? Because in normal times
about 40 per cent. of them are unemployable, the degenerates who are
such a cause for alarm and concern to the nation. Of the rest, most are
unsuited to agricultural work, and only a moderate proportion can be
helped in that way. That some tolerable land can be so cultivated, and
some industrious unemployed so maintained is true, but it requires the
spiritual amalgam of the Salvation Army, or some such body of patient
and capable enthusiasts, to solve the difficult problem, for a selected
minority of the submerged, on their farm colonies. They are doing the
work of St. George.

Above these stricken ones comes the ordinary farm labourer, who is
unfortunately migrating to the towns. Him Mr. Ruskin hoped to settle on
land. Such a scheme of small holdings, if backed by sufficient capital,
worked by experts, and favourably situated for a market, might even in
the seventies have succeeded. Of course it would not have had about it
all the moral excellences, the grace of character and the charm of
nature and art, which delight us so in the St. George’s lands of the
future which we read about in _Fors_. However, Ruskin never concentrated
upon it, but spent most of his time and of the resources of the Guild
on the Sheffield Museum instead. He did what he found he could do the
best. He knew he was leaving great gaps for others to fill up. He says,
touchingly, in the Preface to _Love’s Meinie_ in 1881: “It has been,
throughout, my trust that if Death should write on these plans of mine
‘What this man began to build he was not able to finish,’ God may also
write on them, not in anger, but in aid, ‘A stronger than he cometh.’”

But with labour and patience and against strong hostile political
forces, the Small Holdings Act has been for some years at work. The
obstruction of the squires still renders it useless in many counties,
and there can be no more true task for St. George than to support
agencies such as the Small Holdings Association. By its means, as a
matter of fact, the peasantry is being restored to the land on a proper
business basis. Tasks of this magnitude require organization on a large
scale, and the payment of proper returns. No social benefit is given by
letting some individual hold land at less than its value. The County
Councils since the war are engaged upon it. We are now again on the eve
of a large settlement of returned soldiers on the land, and of an
attempt to brighten the villages.

St. George, again, ordered that the homes of workpeople should be
cheerful, that they should have gardens and flowers and sunshine, that
the long miserable rows of uniform cottages should be of the past. These
things, largely under the inspiration of Ruskin, are being done, in
First Garden City at Letchworth, and in such model villages as
Bournville, New Earswick, Port Sunlight, the Hampstead suburb, and
similar suburbs at Manchester and Hull. But it is all on far too small a
scale. The true task of St. George to-day is to strengthen these
progressive movements. The growth of the towns since 1871 has made this
urban problem the most urgent of all. How many rows of dreadful box
homes have been built. The country is being choked by the spreading
towns. Purely agricultural colonies are good, but towns cannot be
founded without the help of the manufacturers who make a town.

Again, the intention of St. George was to have a happy body of
workpeople, loyally co-operating with a superior type of employer, and
banishing greedy competition. The surviving remnant of the Guild of St.
George has very little in its own power in this way, but amongst the
employers who have built these model villages there exists just this
kind of relation in manifold ways. And again, it pays. When in the
British Association at York the firm of Rowntree and Co. was being
commended for the benefits they are giving their workpeople, Mr. Seebohm
Rowntree, whose whole heart is in the work, made a speech insisting that
it paid them. He did this in order to induce other people to do the
same, and to show that it was feasible for the ordinary manufacturer.

Broadly speaking, we may say that what we are all striving for is being
done, in ways more wholesale and more complicated than could have been
worked out in the seventies. Two generations of social pioneers,
thinkers, and experimenters, have been grappling with the problems since
then, so that we should not expect precisely the same prescription to be
given by the social physician to-day as was given by one of the great
pioneers of healing nearly fifty years ago.

The agricultural settlement seems the furthest from practical politics.
Nevertheless, a series of enactments since 1881 have established in
Ireland that very arrangement of a peasant proprietary paying a fixed
rent to the State, which is the essence of Ruskin’s proposal; except
that the Irish rents under the Land Purchase Acts are terminable after a
period of years; and so rather more easy than Ruskin’s. Presumably, if
found successful, the system could be extended. It will certainly occupy
the minds of reformers very much during the immediately coming years.

Education was naturally a chief concern with St. George, and it occupies
Letter XVI of _Time and Tide_.[88] His schools were to be in the fresh
air of the country, and with large playing fields securely their own.
“The Laws of Health and exercises enjoined by them” are the first
feature of the curriculum; and riding, running, all the honest personal
exercises of offence and defence, and music, are to be included under
this head. Then come “the mental graces of reverence and compassion,
which are to be developed by deliberate and constant exercise,"--which
means, doubtless, that there is to be no girding at passers-by in the
streets, and no rat-catching for amusement. Then, as the bond and
guardian of reverence and compassion, comes “the truth of spirit and
word, of thought and sight--truth earnest and compassionate, sought for
like a treasure, and kept like a crown.” This is to be taught chiefly
“by pressing for close accuracy of statement, as a principle of honour
and as an accomplishment of language.” There is much sound advice about
this in Letter XVI. Then, for the actual curriculum, there come, first,
history; and then natural science and mathematics. But there are to be
three alternative curricula, one for city children, one for country
children, and one for seafaring children. The city children are to study
mathematics and the arts, country children, natural history and
agriculture, and the future sailors, astronomy, geography, and marine
natural history. A beginning of variety of just this kind now exists in
the elementary schools, as noted in the last chapter.

After this, all children are to be taught the calling whereby they are
to live.

The curious whimsical paradox that reading and writing are to be
optional subjects, does not, after such a curriculum, amount to much. It
is part of a petulant reaction against merely inferior literary
exercise, by a chief craftsman in it; as a professor of music is the
first to tell you that it is no use teaching music to those who will do
no good with it. Ruskin says that the teaching of the three R’s is of no
use to people who will only read rubbish and write falsehood, and, put
that way, one is bound to agree.

No school of St. George has ever been begun, though there are schools
which have kindred aims. Such schools are away in the country with farm
and garden, with little pressure of outside examinations, a varied
curriculum, great attention to athletic exercise, to natural science and
history, with classics and the study of grammar practically shelved, and
the prime concern of the school management the inculcation of reverence
and truthfulness and gentleness. The Natural History, the Arts and
Handicrafts, the reading aloud and the committing scripture and poetry
to memory would be after his own heart.

We recognize in this luminous and suggestive treatment of education that
the right note is struck--the basal idea is that “you have not educated
a boy when you have taught him to know what he did not know, but to be
what he had not been, and to behave as he had not behaved.” And, with
the present stiff system and starved appliances, human and material,
with which we educate the citizens of the future, what a glorious vision
Ruskin’s is, of what that education might so easily be. His protest
against the three R’s is merely a humorous outcry against their
insufficiency, their mechanical character, and their commercial end. How
that much, and that much only, of mental outfit has worked, is printed
large in the circulation of _Illustrated Bits, Scraps_, all sensational
evening papers and the Bottomley, Harmsworth and Hulton presses. But
clerks and pupil teachers are cheap.

Ruskin’s actual work as a University Professor was notable; and many are
the men, now old or gone, whom he influenced at Oxford. To be one of the
influences at Oxford or Cambridge is a worthy use of gifts of the
highest kind. The present Drawing Schools at Oxford are a monument of
his labour and his liberality.

It is easy indeed for the Philistine to laugh at the pageantry of the
vision of the England of St. George. There were to be “Marshals” with
great districts subject to them, “Landlords,” men of fortune devoting
their gifts to the service of the Guild, and owing their lordship to the
fact that “they could work as much better than their labourers, as a
good knight than his soldiers.” These were all to be called _Comites
Ministrantes_; under them the _Comites Militantes_ were the rank and
file of the workers on the Company’s lands. Finally the _Comites
Consilii_, the only class who have materialized, were the companions
contributing, but not residing on St. George’s lands.[89]

To sum up, then, the present public duty of a good Ruskinian:

He will support the labour colonies of the Salvation Army and Small
Holdings Associations. He will invest in the stock of Garden City or
other Garden Suburbs; he will work for the Minority Report on the Poor
Law, and for all plans for strengthening and humanizing Education, for
Town Planning and Smoke Abatement. He will labour to extend among the
laity the duties of the clergy, and among the clergy the spirit of the
layman, he will help all Peace Societies, and labour to promote good
understanding with other countries through the League of Nations. He
will clip the wings of capital seeking to use the British Flag as a
business asset, and he will do this by a capital levy, the super-tax and
the Death Duties. He will be a mild and reasonable Socialist, so far as
to extend the scope of municipal action as it may be found practicable.
He would support the principle of a minimum wage, co-operative
partnerships, and collective bargaining; and he would probably give
cautiously some power to segregate the feeble-minded. He would provide
Art Galleries and Museums housed in noble buildings, and would
religiously preserve the surviving beauty of the country side. Two
possible changes may be treated at greater length.

I. The higher professional activities may be still further removed from
competition and put under salaried service. There will be competition
for posts; that is right; but if medical men and lawyers did not depend
upon fees, we should be rid of many abuses; and the work would gain in
dignity. I believe clergymen, professors and public schoolmasters do as
good work as those who follow callings more directly dependent on the
casual payments and goodwill of customers. With regard to education,
there would be danger of loss as well as of gain, if private schools and
private tutors were abolished. They should remain available for those
who desire them. There will always be people who demand a special
religious atmosphere or who wish to make experiments. And there will be
pupils who from bad health, or neglect of early training, could not
properly benefit from the schools of the State. It is not necessary that
the public body in control should be either the State or the
Municipality. In my view, neither the universities nor the public
schools would benefit by such a change. Nevertheless, it is becoming
increasingly agreed that the nation should shoulder a larger part of the
expense, and guarantee the quality of the teaching, more widely and
liberally than it does at present. In this connection it is all the more
necessary that the State should clear itself of militarism. For if
military training were to become compulsory in schools, as is seriously
threatened, the nation would be once more as acutely divided about it,
as it has been, so long and so disastrously, over denominational
schools. We should have conscientious objectors in permanence.

Nor can we proscribe the private practitioner, for the wealthy, if there
were any, or for the medically heterodox. Yet, how much bad pretentious
work, how much humbug and servility, would be spared to their profession
if most of them became public officials, only doctors know.

I am not qualified to say whether the legal profession should be
nationalized, nor how much. But things could hardly be in worse case
than they are at present, when the worthy members of a necessary
profession are regarded by many as little better than birds of prey.

It may be said that modest State salaries would not attract able men
into the professions so organized. But if the profits of trade were
socialized as proposed, or divided among guild members, there would not
be that golden alternative lure.

II. In those matters which are left to the adjustment of free
competition, it is necessary that everyone should be in a fair position
to bargain, so that there may be no compulsion due to sheer starvation.
This requires to be done so carefully that an actual maintenance at a
tolerable standard, and permanently available without work, should not
be offered to the able-bodied. Two suggestions have been made which are
well worth considering.

Alfred Russel Wallace proposes that a daily dole of bread, enough to
sustain life, should be easily available to the indigent or the out of
work. Tickets should be accessible at all Post Offices, Police Stations,
and from magistrates, clergymen and others, on making out a claim of
need. Thus actual starvation would be warded off.[90]

A more elaborate proposal is that to whose advocacy my friend Mr. Dennis
Milner and his wife are devoting their lives. He proposes that everyone,
rich and poor, from birth to death, should be the recipient of a certain
pension, to be provided by a four shillings in the pound Income Tax, on
all incomes great and small, to be deducted at the source. Thus,
one-fifth of everyone’s income would be redistributed on a flat rate, as
a capitation grant. It would provide on pre-war incomes about four
shillings and threepence per week per head. So that a family of five,
receiving twenty-one shillings and threepence a week, or £55 a year,
would also pay £55 Income Tax, if their other income was £220. They
would neither lose nor gain. Every family of that size receiving a
smaller income would gain by the scheme; everyone above that limit would
lose. It would thus encourage marriage and the raising of families, by
constituting a tax on the unmarried. The man of a thousand a year, with
a wife and three children, would pay £200 and receive £55--reducing his
income to £855. One great advantage to the poor would be that it would
save them from most or all of the insurance premiums they pay, of all
sorts. The scheme is attractively expounded in pamphlets.[91]

Clearly its greatest difficulty is due to the fact that we are likely to
have so great an Income Tax to pay for war, that to pay also for welfare
may be beyond the willingness of the public.



_CHAPTER VII_

_USURY_


Ruskin’s attack upon the taking of interest for capital is the part of
his doctrine which goes deepest into our business system. It has in
consequence weakened his influence, and has not, even by himself, been
put into practice in this country. But he spent much of his strength
upon it in his later years. In _Munera Pulveris_, written in 1862, we
find him stating[92] that Usury is “merely taking an exorbitant sum for
the use of anything"--“the essence of the usury being that it is
obtained by advantage of opportunity or necessity, and not as due reward
for labour,” and he therefore includes high profits for middlemen under
the term: but in later editions he adds a footnote to say that Mr. W. C.
Sillar[93] has since shown him that the payment of any interest at all
is unjustifiable, and is real usury.

It is well to distinguish carefully between Interest and Profits. The
business man who exploits foreign concessions, and who stimulates wars,
may or may not be a capitalist. He may be using other people’s capital.
He makes his profit as reward for his work, his luck, his enterprise,
and an often risky responsibility. The capitalist, properly so called,
is, on the other hand, an investor who simply takes his interest. Often,
doubtless, one man fills both parts, but in general theoretical
discussion they should be kept separate.

Interest, even if unavoidable, tends to increase the inequalities of
distribution, and beyond a certain point it becomes a social danger, and
may even become a disease in the body politic. It is one of the least
desirable consequences of the system of private property; but it is, I
fear, an inherent part of it--to be got rid of only under a communal
system where private property does not exist.

His new convictions did not take an absorbing hold on Ruskin’s mind for
some years. In September, 1872, he writes in _Fors_, Letter XXI, §§ 18,
19, in reply to a remonstrance from Mr. Sillar: “I am very careless
about such minor matters as the present conditions of ... banking. I
hold bank stock simply because I suppose it to be safer than any other
stock, and I take the interest of it because, though taking interest is,
in the abstract, as wrong as war, the entire fabric of society is at
present so connected with both usury and war, that it is not possible
violently to withdraw, nor wisely to set example of withdrawing, from
either evil.”

“Denunciations of interest are much beside the mark unless they are
accompanied with some explanation of the manner in which borrowing and
lending, when necessary, can be carried on without it.” There is a
passage to the same effect in the notes to _Fors_, Letter XLIII, written
in July, 1874.

It is easy to show why interest is both just and unavoidable, if we
accept the justice of private property in general. By advancing capital
we enable the borrower to carry on profitable operations which will pay
him after he has given us somewhat for the advance. It pays him to
borrow. He obtains an immediate order upon labour from the lender who
postpones using it for his own pleasure. It is this element of Time
which constitutes the whole reason for interest. Ready money, that is an
immediate order upon labour for which nothing has yet been given, has a
price depending upon the action of those who have it and those who want
it, under the same law of Supply and Demand as governs the price of
other commodities. The current rate of interest, after taking off the
varying payment for risk, represents both the reward for which the
capitalists will save the last portion of fluid capital which is saved,
and the “final” utility of the last dose of money available to
borrowers. The capitalist needs an investment as much as the borrower
needs capital. The advantage is not all on one side. Bankers desire
eagerly to grant overdrafts to safe people. The whole process is
essential to production on a large scale, and to public activity, and
there is not necessarily any oppression in it, in our present state of
society, though it is, like everything else, liable to abuse.

But to a man who has enough already “abstinence” is no hardship. Time is
his friend. Hence a measure of government interference to stop great
fortunes is just and necessary, whether by a heavy income tax or a
capital levy, or by death duties, all steeply graduated. Another drastic
extension of these duties would be found in the limitation of the right
of bequest, fixing a maximum amount which a man may receive, or may
leave, by inheritance or bequest. Bequest is not a natural, it is a
strictly legal, right; and the law may regulate it.[94] This would check
the worst of the evil of vast fortunes, which are a curse to their
owners, and the other side of the poverty shield. They are rarely made
in one generation. Bacon says: “Usury bringeth the treasure of a realm
into few hands; for the usurer trading on a certainty, and other men on
uncertainties, at the end of the game all the money will be in the box.”

We will now put Ruskin’s argument, from the one place where he wrote it
out at length. It is the well-known passage on “the position of William”
in the first letter of _Fors_, January, 1871.

The following is there quoted from Mrs. Fawcett’s _Political Economy for
Beginners_. She translated it from the French of Bastiat:

     There was once in a village a poor carpenter, who worked hard from
     morning to night. One day James thought to himself, “With my
     hatchet, saw, and hammer, I can only make coarse furniture, and can
     only get the pay for such. If I had a plane, I should please my
     customers more, and they would pay me more. Yes, I am resolved, I
     will make myself a plane.” At the end of ten days James had in his
     possession an admirable plane, which he valued all the more for
     having made it himself. Whilst he was reckoning all the profits
     which he expected to derive from the use of it, he was interrupted
     by William, a carpenter in the neighbouring village. William,
     having admired the plane, was struck with the advantages which
     might be gained from it. He said to James:

     “You must do me a service; lend me the plane for a year.” As might
     be expected, James cried out, “How can you think of such a thing,
     William? Well, if I do this service, what will you do for me in
     return?”

     W. “Nothing. Don’t you know that a loan ought to be gratuitous?”

     J. “I know nothing of the sort; but I do know that if I were to
     lend you my plane for a year, it would be giving it to you. To tell
     the truth, that was not what I made it for.”

     W. “Very well, then; I ask you to do me a service; what service do
     you ask me in return?”

     J. “First, then, in a year the plane will be done for. You must
     therefore give me another exactly like it.”

     W. “That is perfectly just. I submit to these conditions. I think
     you must be satisfied with this, and can require nothing further.”

     J. “I think otherwise. I made the plane for myself, and not for
     you. I expected to gain some advantage from it. I have made the
     plane for the purpose of improving my work and my condition; if you
     merely return it to me in a year, it is you who will gain the
     profit of it during the whole of that time. I am not bound to do
     you such a service without receiving anything in return. Therefore,
     if you wish for my plane, besides the restoration already bargained
     for, you must give me a new plank as a compensation for the
     advantages of which I shall be deprived.”

     These terms were agreed to; but the singular part of it is that at
     the end of the year, when the plane came into James’s possession,
     he lent it again; recovered it, and lent it a third and fourth
     time. It has passed into the hands of his son, who still lends it.
     Let us examine this little story. The plane is the symbol of all
     capital, and the plank is the symbol of all interest.

Thus far Bastiat: Ruskin comments:--

“If this be an abridgment, what a graceful piece of highly wrought
literature the original story must be! I take the liberty of abridging
it a little more.

“James makes a plane, lends it to William on 1st January for a year.
William gives him a plank for the loan of it, wears it out, and makes
another for James which he gives him on 31st December. On 1st January he
again borrows the new one; and the arrangement is repeated continuously.
The position of William therefore is, that he makes a plane every 31st
December, lends it to James till the next day, and pays James a plank
annually for the privilege of lending it to him on that evening. This,
in future investigations of capital and interest, we will call, if you
please, ‘the Position of William.’

“You may not at the first glance see where the fallacy lies: (the writer
of the story evidently counts on your not seeing it at all).

“If James did not lend the plane to William, he could only get his gain
of a plank by working with it himself, and wearing it out himself. When
he had worn it out at the end of the year, he would, therefore, have to
make another for himself. William, working with it instead, gets the
advantage instead, which he must, therefore, pay James his plank for;
and return to James what James would, if he had not lent his plane, then
have had--not a new plane, but the worn-out one. James must make a new
one for himself, as he would have had to do if no William had existed;
and if William likes to borrow it again for another plank, all is fair.

“That is to say, clearing the story of its nonsense, that James makes a
plane annually, and sells it to William for its proper price, which, in
kind, is a new plane. But this arrangement has nothing whatever to do
with principal or with interest.”

I fear Ruskin is wrong. He forgets a sinking fund for depreciation. His
error lies in supposing that a plane can be used for a year, and worn
out, for no return but a plank. If planes only last a year and are of
advantage, their value in use is equal to that of the cost of a plane
plus a plank, plus some more. That is, the cost of making a plane is
less by a plank and more than the benefit a workman can get out of it
before it is worn out, after paying for his labour. The benefit in a
year to the user is more than plane plus plank, or William would not go
on. That is the point of the service of all capital, intelligently
used.

William has to pay his tax of a plank per annum because he is not
beforehand with his needs. He gets the advantage of the plane every year
twelve months before he can afford to make it; and the advantage of
being in advance of his needs goes to James. The element of Time is
everything. A plane at the beginning of a year is of more service than a
plane you have to wait for till the end. Ruskin begins his sequence of
time on December 31st of the first year, avoiding the whole point. And
the position of William is therefore not unfair; though it is one to be
avoided.

There is little to be added of the nature of argument; though _Fors_ is
scattered over with allusions to the subject, and discussions with many
correspondents are printed in full.[95]

These, and many other shorter passages,[96] consist largely of intuitive
prophetic assertion of the sinfulness of interest, even the slightest.
Much space is occupied by criticisms of the author’s own practice in
living on the proceeds of Bank Stock, and his very cogent replies
thereto. They amount to an admission that the doctrine does not fit the
present time. There are impressive accounts also of the miseries of
usury-ridden countries like India, and of the folly of borrowed capital.
But there is no light thrown on how business is to be conducted without
it: there is nothing immediately practical.

The array of authority against usance for money is weighty and of
ancient date.

Lev. xxv. 35-37: “And if thy brother be poor and powerless with his
hands at thy side, thou shalt take his part upon thee, to help him, as
thy proselyte and thy neighbour; and thy brother shall live with thee.
Thou shalt take no usury of him, nor anything over and above, and thou
shalt fear thy God. I am the Lord, and thy brother shall live with thee.
Thou shalt not give him thy money for usury; and thou shalt not give him
thy food for increase.” (J. R. translated from LXX.) Exodus xxii. 25 and
Deuteronomy xxiii. 19 are similar in purport. Psalm xv. refers to the
man “who putteth not out his money to usury, nor taketh reward against
the innocent”; as being a fit person to abide in the Lord’s tabernacle,
and dwell in His holy hill. Here we have the taking of interest running
parallel with the corruption of the high trust of the judicial bench.
Ezekiel xviii. 8, 13, 17 is contemporary with Leviticus, and is
practically the same voice, representing Jewish opinion on the
resettlement of the State after the Captivity. Here usury is classed
with every abominable wickedness.

In these Jewish passages it was the taking of interest from a brother
Hebrew that was forbidden. This limitation to the profitable use of
capital may have early led the Jew capitalist to the permitted Gentile
outlet; and have caused him, in lending to the outside world, to carry
with the act a spice of uncharitableness and conscious ill-will. These
passages are a testimony to the extraordinary cohesiveness and patriotic
consciousness of the restored nation. Such a proviso of itself is both
cause and consequence; it leads to further isolation from others.

In the parable of the Talents, the king who was made to say, “Thou
knewest that I was an hard man,” is also made to say, “Thou shouldest
have given my money to the bankers that at my coming I should have
received mine own with usury.” But I dare not deduce anything from
this. The Parables never apply all round; they only teach one lesson at
a time. He who taught the duty of prayer by means of the Parable of the
unjust judge, and the duty of using present opportunity by the Parable
of the unjust steward, might easily teach the duty of the use of the
gifts of God, without implying that God was either a “hard man” or a
usurer. All these stories may have been accompanied by some such
addition as this, that if even with unjust and hard men this teaching
holds, will it not be far more worth while to pray to God and to
faithfully use His opportunities and His gifts?

There is, however, one passage, not in the four Gospels, but well based
on tradition:--“Be honourable bankers”; and it certainly does seem
strange, if the whole business of money-dealing were wrong, that that
illustration of the use of spiritual capital should have been selected.
The fact that usury was denounced by the Early Church may have led to
the non-inclusion of this dubious text in the Canon.

Denunciations of usury are commonplaces among the Fathers of the Church.
It was wholly forbidden to the clergy and sometimes to the laity. Many
have been the sermons, of the fiercest character, delivered against it
by the Bishops of the Catholic and Anglican Churches. John Wesley told
his followers “to die sooner than put anything in pawn or borrow or lend
on usury.” His rule on the subject was, however, explained later on by
himself as being against “unlawful interest”; upon which Ruskin remarks:
“Doubtless his disciples know what rate of interest is lawful, and what
not; and also by what law it was made so; and always pause with pious
accuracy at the decimal point whereat the excellence of an investment
begins to make it criminal.” Nevertheless, Wesley was right.

Turning to the Greek world we find usury condemned by Solon and
Lycurgus, Plato and Aristotle (“money sterile by nature”); and a Roman
voice comes from Cato. From Arabia is heard the word of Mohammed. And,
of great Englishmen, we find Lord Bacon, and perhaps Shakespeare,
teaching the same. Concerning these it is to be noted, that being before
the days of joint company ownership, their testimony was solely against
private money-lending; and the one authority, John Wesley, who lived in
the early days of modern business, was not against interest as such in
his later years. Nor again, did these authorities attack Rent, which
Ruskin is consistent in also reprobating. The landowning aristocracy,
we shall remember, are to be the recipients instead of a Government
annuity, as wages for their work of governing their inferiors. Amongst
an agricultural, noncommercial people, the usurer is a sinister figure.
This must have been the case in Palestine, and in agricultural England.
To-day he is the curse of India, whose cultivators are enslaved by the
money-lenders under English law. In short, we may conclude that it
requires a fair field and genuine commercial habits to make interest a
public benefit.

The change from the earlier to the later John Wesley is most
significant. It represents the change to modern business on a large
scale, which occurred during his lifetime. It is noticeable that since
his time the attack on Interest has ceased, but for Ruskin, among
religious teachers. As a counsel of ultimate perfection in a communist
State, of course, Interest would be abolished; but most Socialists admit
that it is an essential part of the institution of private property, and
must stand or fall with it.

There may yet be great revolutions in our sense of duty. We may come to
extend kindness to animals to the extraordinary length of not eating
them. That excessive toil and numbing poverty should exist around us,
may some day become a reproach to us, as we feed on the roses and lie on
the lilies of life, which are often provided for us by the said
labourers. By the time, then, that we come to love our neighbours as
ourselves, we shall probably not be anxious to take advantage of our
position of being a little beforehand with the world, of having money to
lend; and may even sink the time advantage thereby at our disposal; and
not take interest. But we shall be different then; and so will the world
we live in. It is a kind of altruism which absolutely needs a fit
environment. If the cessation of income from investments belongs to the
Christianity which is to come, before this faith shall have been
realized we shall have pooled our property into a common store, and the
question of private investment will have fallen to the ground. Only
among the Doukhobors has this kind of Christianity yet notably realized
itself, and great is their well-being. But we must go on like Ruskin and
take our Interest for the present.

The real trouble is not in the interest, but in the great fortunes. That
an upper limit for wealth would be a blessing to the rich, and a solid
gain to the nation at large, has long been my conviction. Ruskin says it
is also his “long fixed conviction that one of the most important
conditions of a healthful system of social economy, would be the
restraint of the properties and incomes of the upper classes within
certain fixed limits. The temptation to use every energy in the
accumulation of wealth being thus removed, another and a higher ideal of
the duties of advanced life would be necessarily created in the national
mind. By withdrawal of those who had attained the prescribed limits of
wealth from commercial competition, earlier worldly success, and earlier
marriage, with all its beneficent moral results, would become possible
to the young; while the older men of active intellect, whose sagacity is
now lost or warped in the furtherance of their own meanest interest,
would be induced unselfishly to occupy themselves in the superintendence
of public institutions or furtherance of public advantage. And out of
this class it would be found natural and prudent always to choose the
members of the legislative body of the Commons; and to attach to the
order also some peculiar honours, in the possession of which such
complacency would be felt as would more than replace the unworthy
satisfaction of being supposed richer than others, which to many men is
the principal charm of their wealth. And although no law of this purport
would ever be imposed on themselves by the actual upper classes, there
is no hindrance to its being gradually brought into force from beneath,
without any violent or impatient proceedings.”[97]

As a type of Ruskin’s satirical humour in controversy we will indulge
ourselves with an extract from his argument with the late Bishop of
Manchester on usury. Ruskin publicly challenged Dr. Fraser to the
encounter. The Bishop had somewhat sensibly remarked that religious
sanctions ought not to be imposed in cases which they never originally
contemplated, referring to Leviticus on usury. Ruskin replies:

“I do not know whether by the phrase, presently after used by your
Lordship, ‘religious sanctions,’ I am to understand the Law of God which
David loved and Christ fulfilled, or whether the splendour, the
commercial prosperity, and the familiar acquaintance with all the
secrets of science and treasures of art, which we admire in the City of
Manchester, must in your Lordship’s view be considered as ‘cases’ which
the intelligence of the Divine Lawgiver could not have originally
contemplated. Without attempting to disguise the narrowness of the
horizon grasped by the glance of the Lord from Sinai, nor the
inconvenience of the commandments which Christ has directed those who
love Him to keep, am I too troublesome or too exigent in asking from one
of those whom the Holy Ghost has made our overseers, at least a distinct
chart of the Old World as contemplated by the Almighty, and a clear
definition of even the inappropriate tenor of the orders of Christ; if
only that the modern scientific Churchman may triumph more securely in
the circumference of his heavenly vision, and accept more gratefully the
glorious liberty of the free thinking children of God?”



_CHAPTER VII_

_WAR_


The fact that War is the commonest and the most pernicious way of using
large masses of capital leads us naturally from Usury to War. Ruskin
connects the subject with Capitalism thus:[98]

“Capitalists, when they do not know what to do with their money,
persuade the peasants, in various countries, that the said peasants want
guns to shoot each other with. The peasants accordingly borrow guns, out
of the manufacture of which the capitalists get a percentage, and men of
science much amusement and credit. Then the peasants shoot a certain
number of each other, until they get tired; and burn each other’s homes
down, in various places. Then they put the guns back into towers,
arsenals, etc. in ornamental patterns (and the victorious party put also
some ragged flags in churches). And then the capitalists tax both
annually, ever afterwards, to pay interest on the loan of the guns and
gunpowder.”

The horrors of the Franco-German war of 1871, relatively small as they
now appear, were a nightmare to him, and cloud the first volume of
_Fors_, which records his current thoughts in that year.

His most prominent utterance is his lecture on “War” delivered to the
students at the Engineering College at Woolwich in 1865 and printed in
_The Crown of Wild Olive_. It appears, throughout, to be in praise of
war. But we shall see that great deductions are to be made. Nevertheless
it begins appallingly enough by stating that all fine arts have been
founded in war, and can only be practised by warlike nations. He gives
as instances, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. The instances are all fallacious,
particularly those of the peace-loving people in the Nile Valley, and
the very inartistic Romans. Nor is there any proof that war either
caused or aided the artistic faculty of the Greeks. How can there be?
The characteristic warrior city--Sparta--was as inartistic as Woolwich.
He goes a step further to please his audience of young warrior-students
by the strange assertion that “war is the foundation of all the high
virtues and faculties of men”: and that, in History, we find coupled
together “peace and sensuality, peace and selfishness--peace and death.”
“I found that all the great nations learned their truth of word and
strength of thought in war: that they were nourished in war, and wasted
by peace; taught by war and deceived by peace; trained by war, and
betrayed by peace; in a word that they were born in war, and expired in
peace.”[99]

Such is the rash and partial generalization of the rhetorician, based on
this much of historic truth that the early years of a nation’s life have
often been occupied in conflict for safety or empire, and its later,
more peaceful and more prosperous years are marked sometimes by the
weakening influences of wealth, and end in decay. But it is hard,
indeed, impossible I venture to say, to show that the motives or the
methods of war are not, from beginning to end, retrograde and barbaric,
a harking back to the life of the beast; and not the source of any of
these good things named.

But now comes the antidote; after such an exordium, what manner of peace
address might he not give to those Woolwich men and they listen?

First he excepts from his approval “the rage of a barbarian wolf flock,”
and the “habitual restlessness or rapine of mountaineers,” and “the
occasional struggle of a strong, peaceful nation for its life"--a
strange exception that--and the “contest of merely ambitious nations for
extent of power"--a wide exception that. It leaves him three kinds of
beneficial war: war for exercise or play, out of mere high spirits and
unused energies of the upper classes--war for aggression against
surrounding evil--and wars for defence of noble institutions and pure
households.

I. As to wars for pastime, we find that they are to be fought somewhat
in the manner of duels or tournaments by the officers; by the idle young
men who are too proud for peaceful business, and whose arms and legs
want play. There is to be no gathering of peasants to fire into one
another; and Carlyle on the thirty peasants from Dumdrudge is helpfully
quoted, from _Sartor Resartus_. The man who could quote that to Woolwich
students could do most things with an audience. We next have a little
paragraph thrown in on Arbitration. “Grant,” he says sarcastically,
“that no law of reason can be understood by nations; no law of justice
submitted to by them; and that, while questions of a few acres and of
petty cash, can be determined by truth and equity, the questions which
are to issue in the perishing or saving of Kingdoms can be determined
only by the truth of the sword, and the equity of the rifle.”[100] I
doubt if any one has ever had the ear of that audience of thoughtless
aspiring soldier students to an Arbitration argument, before or since.
He proceeds to wash his hands wholly of modern war.

“If you have to take masses of men from all industrial employment,--to
feed them by the labour of others,--to provide them with destructive
machines varied daily in national rivalship of inventive cost; if you
have to ravage the country which you attack--to destroy, for a score of
future years, its roads, its woods, its cities and its harbours; and if,
finally, having brought masses of men, counted by hundreds of thousands,
face to face, you tear those masses to pieces with jagged shot, and
leave the living creatures, countlessly beyond all help of surgery, to
starve and parch, through days of torture, down into clots of clay--what
book of accounts shall record the cost of your work--what book of
judgment sentence the guilt of it?”[101]

Methinks it sounds not unlike a Peace Address.

II. We pass next to wars of aggression against evil--and the lecturer
spends powerful pages on the selfishness and faithlessness of ambitious
warlike kings; on the common degradation of the idea of power; and on
the need for concentrating all our energies on home reforms. We are
warned against supposing that a big nation is a strong one, bade to aim
at union of hearts rather. “Only that nation gains true territory which
gains itself.” “A nation,” he proceeds, “does not strengthen itself by
seizing dominion over races whom it cannot benefit.” “Whatever apparent
increase of majesty and of wealth may have accrued to us from the
possession of India, whether these prove to us ultimately power or
weakness, depends wholly on the degree in which our influence on the
native race shall be benevolent and exalting.”[102]

He nevertheless believes that the rule of England is for the good of the
subject races, is a national duty and a piece of self-sacrifice and
world service, the English white man’s burden. He has an eloquent
passage on this subject in his Inaugural Lecture at Oxford, beginning
“Reign or die.” His hostility to the Manchester School comes out in his
characteristic style. “I tell you that the principle of
non-intervention, as now preached among us, is as selfish and cruel as
the worst frenzy of conquest, and differs from it only by being not only
malignant, but dastardly.” “Within these last ten years, we English
have, as a knightly nation, lost our spurs: we have fought where we
should not have fought, for gain; and we have been passive, where we
should not have been passive, for fear.”[103] I am indeed much afraid
that this, spoken in 1865, has generally been the case throughout our
history.

III. As to wars for defence: Ruskin principally devotes himself to
attacking the essential slavery of military obedience: he will have no
mercenary standing armies, only unprofessional citizen armies for
defence.

So he ends with fatherly counsel to his hearers to be industrious and
serious minded, not to bet, to be pure and honourable, and reverent
towards all women; and the ladies present he exhorts to wear black
whenever there is war, that so, by their influence, there may be no more
wars.

There you have a summary of the famous lecture on War in the _Crown of
Wild Olive_, which has weakened Ruskin’s influence with many of his
friends, and done undoubted harm. But I call it on the whole a peace
address given by a man who combined with his hatred of violence and ruin
a certain attachment to picturesque mediævalism. The wars of Arthur or
Roland were his ideal. He recognized the heroism and self-abandonment of
such soldiers as he had read about all his life in Homer and Scott. But
our modern wars include everything he hated; they are wars for trade and
for gain, sordid and financial in origin and sordid and financial in
results.

Ruskin explains his attitude quite clearly in the Appendix to the _Crown
of Wild Olive_, at the beginning of his notes on the Political Economy
of the Kings of Prussia.

“I am often accused of inconsistency; but believe myself defensible
against the charge with respect to what I have said on nearly every
subject except that of war. It is impossible for me to write
consistently of war, for the groups of facts I have gathered about it
lead me to two precisely opposite conclusions.

“When I find this the case, in other matters, I am silent, till I can
choose my conclusion: but, with respect to war, I am forced to speak, by
the necessities of the time; and forced to act, one way or another. The
conviction on which I act is, that it causes an incalculable amount of
avoidable human suffering and that it ought to cease among Christian
nations; and if therefore any of my boy-friends desire to be soldiers, I
try my utmost to bring them into what I conceive to be a better mind.
But, on the other hand, I know certainly that the most beautiful
characters yet developed among men have been formed in war--that all
great nations have been warrior nations--and that the only kinds of
peace which we are likely to get in the present age are ruinous alike to
the intellect and the heart.

“The last lecture in this volume, addressed to young soldiers, had for
its object to strengthen their trust in the virtue of their profession.
It is inconsistent with itself, in its closing appeal to women, praying
them to use their influence to bring wars to an end. And I have been
hindered from completing my long intended notes on the economy of the
Kings of Prussia by continually increasing doubt how far the machinery
and discipline of war, under which they learned the art of government,
was essential for such lesson; and what the honesty and sagacity of the
Friedrich who so nobly repaired his ruined Prussia, might have done for
the happiness of his Prussia, unruined.

“How far, in the future, it may be possible for men to gain the strength
necessary for kingship without either fronting death, or inflicting it,
seems to me not at present determinable. The historical facts are that,
broadly speaking, none but soldiers, or persons with a soldierly
faculty, have ever yet shown themselves fit to be kings; and that no
other men are so gentle, so just, or so clear-sighted. Wordsworth’s
character of the Happy Warrior cannot be reached in the height of it but
by a warrior; nay, so much is it beyond common strength that I had
supposed the entire meaning of it to be metaphorical, until one of the
best soldiers of England[104] himself read me the poem, and taught me,
what I might have known, had I enough watched his own life, that it was
entirely literal.”

By extending his soldierly qualification to “persons with a soldierly
faculty,” he gives the case away. For that can only mean the faculty of
courage, organization and command. These qualities a peaceful ruler
like William Penn possessed in striking measure. The whole passage is
the record of a swaying contest between sentiment and conviction;
between the glamour of the glowing haze of distant tradition and actual
facts, only too closely pressing upon mankind to-day.

Truly the question of the effect of war on character is vital. I had
written here, in pre-war days, some observations upon it; but they seem
to me now faint and platitudinous. We have had since then such
widespread experience of the play of character faced with the dread
calamity of the world-war, that it is too complicated to treat briefly.
We are all saddened and wearied. So I leave it to the experience of the
millions who know more about it from their own experience than I do.

We need not wait for war to harden our fibre and stiffen our backs.
Surely this can be done without wholesale demoralization and
destruction. Are there not national evils to be fought? privations to be
endured here in fighting vice, ugliness and disease, or in voluntarily
participating in poverty? There is courage needed to stand against
public opinion and to lead it, to sacrifice wealth and social repute if
required. These things are what we must turn to for the exercise of the
courage and unselfishness of the soldier. We want more strenuous
asceticism of a form not so essentially unreasonable and destructive as
war.

It would entirely overload this chapter to give any idea of the vigour
and number of the passages in _Fors_ which storm against
war:--“storming” is generally the method, varied, as usual with this
master of fancy and emotion, with stinging sarcasm and mocking raillery.
The burden of his plea throughout is that “the game of our nobles and
the gain of our usurers” is war.[105]

“When you have got the Devil well under foot in Sheffield, you may begin
to stop him from persuading my Lords of the Admiralty that they want a
new grant, etc., etc., to make his machines with.... The fiend sees that
he can blind you, through your lust for drink, into quietly allowing
yourselves to pay fifty millions a year, that the rich may make their
machines of blood, and play at shedding blood.”[106]

“In this contest (of poor and rich) assuredly, the victory cannot be by
violence; every conquest under the Prince of War retards the standards
of the Prince of Peace.”[107]

He quotes[108] from the _Daily Telegraph_ the following from its
description of the capture of Paris: “Each demolished house has its own
legend of sorrow, of pain, and horror; each vacant doorway speaks to the
eye, and almost to the ear, of hasty flight, as armies of fire came--of
weeping women and trembling children running away in awful fear,
abandoning the home that saw their birth, the old house they loved--of
startled men seizing quickly under each arm their most valued goods, and
rushing, heavily laden, after their wives and babes, leaving to hostile
hands the task of burning all the rest. When evening falls, the wretched
outcasts, worn with fatigue and tears, reach Versailles, St. Germain, or
some other place outside the range of fire, and there they beg for bread
and shelter, homeless, foodless, broken with despair. And this,
remember, has been the fate of something like a hundred thousand people
during the last four months. Versailles alone has about fifteen thousand
such fugitives to keep alive, all ruined, all hopeless, all vaguely
asking the grim future what still worse fate it may have in store for
them.”

The following passage is interesting, however feeble it may appear in
view of our recent developments of war:--

“We fight inelegantly as well as expensively, with machines instead of
bow and spear; we kill about a thousand now to the score then, in
settling any quarrel--(Agincourt was won with the loss of less than a
hundred men; only 25,000 English altogether were engaged at Creçy; and
12,000, some say only 8,000, at Poictiers); we kill with far ghastlier
wounds, crashing bones and flesh together; we leave our wounded
necessarily for days and nights in heaps on the fields of battle; we
pillage districts twenty times as large, and with completer destruction
of more valuable property; and with a destruction as irreparable as it
is complete; for if the French or English burnt a church one day, they
could build a prettier one the next; but the modern Prussians couldn’t
even build so much as an imitation of one; we rob on credit, by
requisition, with ingenious mercantile prolongations of claim; and we
improve contention of arms with contention of tongues, and are able to
multiply the rancour of cowardice, and mischief of lying, in universal
and permanent print; and so we lose our tempers as well as our money,
and become indecent in behaviour as in raggedness.”[109]

“The first reason for all wars and for the necessity of national
defences, is that the majority of persons, high and low, in all European
nations, are Thieves, and in their hearts, greedy of their neighbours’
goods, land, and fame. But besides being Thieves they are also fools,
and have never yet been able to understand that if Cornishmen want
pippins cheap, they must not ravage Devonshire--that the prosperity of
their neighbours is in the end, their own also; and the poverty of their
neighbours, by the communism of God, becomes in the end, their own.”
“And the guilty Thieves of Europe, the real sources of all deadly war in
it, are the Capitalists--that is to say, people who live by percentages
on the labour of others, instead of by fair wages for their own.”[110]

“There is no physical crime at this day, so far beyond pardon--so
without parallel in its untempted guilt, as the making of war-machinery,
and invention of mischievous substance. Two nations may go mad, and
fight like harlots--God have mercy on them:--you, who hand them carving
knives off the table, for leave to pick up a dropped sixpence, what
mercy is there for you?”[111]

“The men who have been killed within the last two months, and whose
work, and the money spent in doing it, have filled Europe with misery
which fifty years will not efface, had they been set at the same cost to
do good instead of evil, and to save life instead of destroying it,
might by this 10th January, 1871, have embanked every dangerous stream
at the roots of the Rhine, the Rhone, and the Po, and left to Germany,
to France and to Italy, an inheritance of blessing for centuries to
come--they and their families living all the while in brightest
happiness and peace. And now! Let the Red Prince look to it: red
inundation bears also its fruit in time.”[112]

He calls War “the moral organization of massacre, and the mechanical
reduplication of ruin.”[113] “All the cruellest wars inflicted, all the
basest luxuries grasped by the idle classes, are thus paid for by the
poor a hundred times over” (in interest on debt).[114]

Thus Ruskin is to be found among the Peace advocates--uttering indeed
the characteristic refrain of Christianity, and saying emphatically in
_Fors_, in so many words, that we are not to avenge injuries. Yet he was
altogether out of sympathy with the ordinary channels of such advocacy.
Liberalism he loathed, democracy he utterly disbelieved in, John Bright
was the object of his occasional angry or contemptuous reference;
anything that savoured of Manchester was condemned as tainted with
political economy; the British aristocrats, the present ones, not ones
selected on new principles of excellence, but even the ones we have,
were to be the leaders of a regenerated England, and fathers of the
Fatherland. Liberty was a red rag to him; he preferred the servitude of
the shepherd dog to the freedom of the buzzing gnat:--and so he
experienced the awkwardness felt by those who, having on some issue
joined the party of reaction, have yet within them their old reforming
zeal: for in reality Ruskin was an enlightened Socialist philanthropist.

For these reasons I fear that his peace influence has been very much
neutralized and wasted; and therefore I have had peculiar pleasure in
bringing it out in this chapter.

All these extracts make it clear that the writer’s hatred of modern war
waged by multitudes of conscript or other soldiers, machine guns, and
chemical explosives, was a constant horror to him; and that his
sentimental admiration for the feudal and Greek chivalry was an academic
and otiose emotion, figuring appropriately as a propitiatory exordium to
the young warriors of Woolwich, but otherwise not an influential part of
his thoughts.

Nevertheless Ruskin was a devotee of the nobler type of imperialism. He
lived before the sordidness of “Empire,” and its taproot in High
Commerce and Finance, had become as plain as they are to-day; and before
the series of wars of Empire-building had culminated in the struggle for
power in the Near East, power whose pursuit formed the principal motive
for the Great World War. The Inaugural Lecture at Oxford is the central
expression of this imperialism, in its concluding paragraphs. There are
kindred passages in _The Crown of Wild Olive_.[115] _A Knight’s Faith_,
the Life of Sir Herbert Edwardes of the Punjab, is written in the
noblest imperialist vein. In this, though not in his economic teaching
in general, Ruskin falls under the sentimental glamour of popular
phrases, and loses touch with reality.



_CHAPTER IX_

_MACHINERY_


Ruskin, as we have seen, was both a Conservative and a constructive
Socialist. He hated the industrial developments which he saw around
him--that which was called progress he saw to be full of evil, and he
wanted to undo it. That made him a Conservative. But he had his own line
of development, which was an idealized feudalism. What is there for us
to learn now from either of these teachings, the negative Conservative
cry against steam power and railways and bicycles, the positive advance
towards Guild Socialism?

The pastoral happiness of peasant life Ruskin thought he found in
Bavaria, in Savoy, in Tuscany. He never really lived among the
peasantry, nor was he, the shy visitor to the best hotels, with his
courier and his portfolio, accustomed to familiar intercourse,
particularly on money matters, with the worthy sons and daughters of
toil whose industrious and quiet lives he admired. Neither in England,
Scotland, Ireland, nor the Continent can the “merrie England” ideal of
peasant life ever have existed.

In Switzerland or France, where there have been since the Revolution no
feudal landlords, it had a good chance; and also among the “statesmen”
of Cumberland and Westmorland while they survived. The Canton Bern is
to-day to the tourist’s eye a happy and prosperous land, and the other
Protestant cantons resemble it. But we know most about our own northern
“statesmen”; the Swiss or French small proprietor’s life must have been
much the same as theirs. It was a hard, narrow life, absorbed in “money
grubbing,” which was in their case no fault but a chief virtue, being
necessary to survival. If a statesman was of a large and genial nature,
the public-house was his common resort; and most of the stocks of
statesmen came to grief by the recklessness or misfortunes of one
generation. The estate was first mortgaged and then foreclosed and sold.
A succession of steady cultivators, careful of the pence, hardly ever
succeeded in making a family well to do or even comfortable, with
reserves to meet disaster. I speak here of my own forbears. The holdings
were too small. They worked all day and every day, in all weathers,
lived and slept in quarters not conducive to delicate sensitiveness of
feeling. A big attic, separated by a curtain into two, was the sleeping
place of the children and servants, if there were any.[116] Books,
education, travel, were denied them. On a lower level is the life of the
peasants of the Rhone Valley, in dirt and hopelessness and overwork. It
makes for degradation. But where feudal landlords exist, as they do in
most places, the case is worse. The condition of the peasantry of
Eastern Europe has been brought before us since the War in the daily
papers so vividly that none can miss it. The system has broken down in
revolution. It appears to an astonished English public, that the mass of
the people have lived under local tyranny and very near the margin of
maintenance, in Russia and her border states, in Roumania, Poland,
Hungary, Prussia, and in the Balkan lands. This is what we find before
industrial development comes in. There is no need to dwell on the
squalor, on the diseases, on the recurring famines, on the contempt of
the proud. It transpires that the peasants to whom the land has now come
by revolution, are described as so covetous, narrow and selfish--their
trade their politics--that Socialists and idealists are baffled by
them. They will starve a city like Buda-Pesth or Petrograd, when their
supplies are abundant. They do not seem capable at present of a national
or international consciousness, nor of any true democracy larger than
the village.

In England, too, the rustic life which the Industrial Revolution
overthrew, was, in the landlord counties, servile and suffering. The
wages and the politics of the South of England until recent times are
survivals of the system.[117]

We are bound to conclude that to this system we ought not to recur. With
all their faults and disadvantages the people of the industrial
districts are the most educated, the most independent, the most virile.
Numerous economic writers have destroyed, like a sentimental mirage, our
view of the old English village, with its homely comfort and peaceful
independence. We think more now of its toils, its diseases, its infant
mortality, its lost Commons.

It was natural for Ruskin, with his love of white thatched cottages and
leafy lanes bordered by neglected wasteful hedges full of wild
flowers--with his wealthy upbringing, and ignorance of the value of
money and of the direness of most people’s need of it, it was natural
and inevitable that he should loathe the dreadful new mining
villages--rows of cheap insanitary brick houses--and the belching smoke
of the colliery chimney. He preferred Coniston to Barrow. But there is
no practical guidance in that revolt, except indeed the revolt itself;
and that was a message to his time, and is still a message to ours.

There is nothing particularly elevating about farm work, in spite of
Corydon and other shepherds described by the town bred makers of
fantasies. Sheep are the most unpleasant creatures to look after, the
dirtiest and the stupidest. Their scab, fluke, ticks and footrot need
much attention. Apart from their diseases, the scene of the shepherd’s
happy labours will be in winter a turnip field, the crop being eaten off
by sheep. The dirt and squalor of the dung and the animals and the
turnips, the cold and damp, the sleet and the mud and the smells--these
things are not good subjects for poetry. The farmer’s calling is to make
his living out of the death of his animals, and out of their sufferings
when alive, their castration and imprisonment, and their labour. He
measures them by a purely economic test. It is not for us who live on
meat and milk, butter and cheese, and the products of the pig-sty, to
blame farmers for this. They do it for us. But it is not particularly
“improving”; it approaches the calling of the butcher, which is equally
necessary. Why the world is thus built is not, luckily for me, the
subject of this book.

The rest of the labours of the farm are a struggle with the earth--with
weeds and with weather. It is all primitive and built into the bone and
marrow of the race; but it is not more moralizing, nor more romantic, in
practice than working at looms or ledgers. The labourer does not go to
the land as to a leisurely summer home. Hitherto, no way has been found
in England for inducing young people to stay in the villages. We ought
to try to succeed in this. If we do it will be in a new kind of village,
and it will be effected by cheap and rapid transit, and by widely
scattering the ownership or holding of land. Then Ruskin’s aims will be
realized, but not by the only methods he could see in his day. In fact,
railways and domestic machinery would be essential.

Division of Labour goes with the factory system. It was early hailed as
one of the great economies obtained by production on a large scale. It
was found that by constantly keeping a man or a child to one
occupation, an extraordinary degree of sure accuracy and readiness was
obtained. Without the necessity for thinking, and so without risk of
thinking wrong, the nimble fingers repeated hour by hour their appointed
trick, the practised eye ever followed the same mechanism and stopped it
at the same point, the same tool in the same place was ready to the same
hand. Physiologically we believe that all this means that there is
established a rut for the tracks of the brain wheels, a habitual nervous
connection between certain sensory centres and certain motor centres,
without the need for every piece of news to be transmitted by the
sensory centre to the central thinking apparatus in the cerebrum, and a
corresponding order sent down from the central control to the motor
centre.

When we learn to write, the fashion and shape of every _a_, _b_ and _c_
have to be thought over; the hands learn painfully to follow an order
sent down from the central thinking power in the cerebrum, sent down on
information derived through the sensory centres behind the eye, of the
shape of the copy. But in ordinary life we could copy pages of
manuscript and talk and think about something else the whole time.
There is a direct line of nerve flow between the reading apparatus
behind the eye and the writing apparatus behind the hand; and thought is
not required. We have become so far automatic; we have created a
convenient writing machine within us, which works for us and leaves us
free to do other things.

So that if we spend our nine hours a day at working a printing machine,
or stitching leather or silk, or boring holes, or driving in nails, or
sharpening a tool’s edge, or wrapping boxes, or counting or piecing
threads, we are really doing the work of a machine. We do not think: to
think would interfere with the sure regularity of our work.

Now the growth of this division of labour has been quite irresistible.
Its advantages have been such that no manufacturer or nation of
manufacturers could stand without it. The social organism has become
more complex, and with that the differentiation of function has become
more marked. It is a necessary accompaniment of an elaborate social
state; and whether it tends or not to the welfare of the individual it
greatly extends the productive power of the industrial organism, and so
strengthens the organism itself viewed as industrial simply. Thus the
highly differentiated organism has survived, though it may have
sacrificed the individual worker, regarded as a human being. Is there,
therefore, any means whereby we can modify the work of the monotonous
mechanical labourer so as to give him some pleasure in it, and afford
exercise to his other faculties besides that one called out by the
single narrow function he has learnt to repeat day after day? If we can
give scope for his higher faculties, his judgment, his invention, his
knowledge, we shall be avoiding the present waste by which faculties
which might aid production in better ways are wasted on routine.

The greatest cure hitherto found is inherent in the system itself. For
when the work is such that it is done by a human machine, the step is
not far distant when a machine will be actually invented, with a surer
grip of the material, a readier tool for piercing, a straighter edge for
cutting. This process is going on in every department of manufacture.
Boards are planed, picture frames carved, table legs made, mouldings cut
by machinery. Watches and sewing machines are made of interchangeable
parts, each the product of a machine. The only limit to the taking over
of every manufacture by machines seems to be that a large output is
necessary to make it pay to invent and manufacture and sell costly
machines. So great have been the triumphs of many-fingered machinery
that we are not inclined to limit them. Thus, most of the monotonous,
and most of the physically laborious work is done by the man of steel.
For every textile operative in the country rather more than one horse
power is provided by steam; which is equal to the strength of ten adult
men. Self-feeding furnaces are similarly saving of human flesh and
eyesight. Thus our manual workers have largely become makers and minders
of machines. To help to make a machine, to watch and repair it, and take
care of it--even to understand it and to feed it, is a not unworthy form
of labour. To care for a complex machine requires intelligence and a
wide-awake sense of responsibility. It is much better, at any rate, than
hand-loom weaving was, or than nail-making by hand, or match-box-making
is. Even so mechanical a task as working a sewing machine, poor as it
is, may be a trifle less soul-destroying than working with a needle at
plain sewing all day. And though minding looms is monotonous, yet they
turn out so much more cloth per operative, that the evil of monotony of
which we speak is probably a very small percentage per yard produced,
of what it was when weaving was done in the weavers’ cottages by hand.

It is therefore in extending machinery for all articles which have no
individual artistic value that we shall get rid of most of the lower and
more degrading forms of labour--machinery for ploughing, sowing,
reaping, binding, thrashing, dairying, laundry work, baking, cooking,
cutting straight and smoothing clean, grinding and polishing, and for
the processes of printing. These are true friends of man.

It is to be noted that every increase of the gross output which
machinery enables man to produce, increases the demand for the more
skilled portions of the work, for those which require judgment and
character. The multiplication of the printing output of the country has
increased the number of writers, of reporters, of proof-readers, of
overlookers, and of men who can tastefully arrange a title page. It has
also multiplied the demand for men who can draw, can photograph, or can
reproduce illustrations. Similarly the “hands” who work the machines on
a farm are fewer but are probably more intelligent than the agricultural
labourer in a backward country.

It will be observed that this inquiry has left untouched and
unaffected--

1. The skilled artistic crafts where a sense of the beautiful and a
special value in human thought goes to each article.

2. The mass of unskilled and unspecialized labour at the bottom of the
social ladder which division of labour and machine production leave
largely untouched.

To the cleansing, quieting, moralizing of machinery, then, not to its
extinction or supersession, social reformers should apply themselves. To
the compulsory consumption of smoke, to sanitary factories and
workshops, to the substitution of gas or electricity for steam, we must
look with hope.

Therefore, out of the industrial hurly-burly, we must look forward, not
back--accept the industrialization of the world which marked the
nineteenth century, and go on to find a home for humanity in it. It is a
world phenomenon, and it is the result of one thing, the exploitation of
coal.

It is in the abuse of this very coal, on which all manufacturing and
transport depends, that the most obvious wrong has been done to
humanity. The first condition of human happiness to-day is to be found
in the abolition or sufficient abatement of smoke, so keeping our skins
and clothes clean.

This is all on Ruskin’s lines; very central to the preservation of all
he loved. How pervasive was this enemy he did not fully see fifty years
ago. He noted the deterioration of climate in England, during his
lifetime, in two lectures on _The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth
Century_. They were much derided at the time; and they contain curious
passages in which the lack of light, the restless ugly clouds, the
choppy breezes, the cold gloomy summers, were put down to the wrath of
heaven for the sins of the people. They had in fact one simple
explanation--Smoke. A man of Ruskin’s power of perception, constantly
admiring beauty of landscape, could hardly have been wrong in his
impression, fortified by his diaries, that there had been a change for
the worse in the air and skies during his lifetime. The production of
manufacturing smoke over a third (say) of England covered that period.
Over all our coal fields solid particles embarrassed the air currents,
and darkened the sky, and the oily products adhered stickily to the
clouds and to the rain. The weather was, in truth, nature’s punishment
for the haste, the greed, the popular carelessness, which tolerated the
factory and furnace chimneys, and the ill-regulated firesides of
thirty-five millions of people in the British Isles.[118]

Coal ought not to be burnt raw, any more than meat should be eaten raw.
It should be made into gas, coke, tar and sulphate of ammonia--and all
of it be used. A smokeless domestic fuel made of half coked coal could
be made in all gas works, and should be used everywhere, to economize
our now costly coal. Electric power stations, smokelessly operated,
would save much wasteful private production of power. More rigid and
conscientious smoke inspection, abandoned as unpatriotic on a short view
during the war, should be restored. The law should be amended and its
loopholes fastened up.[119] There are many beautiful inventions ready to
be used to make an end of this most gratuitous of our evils, which
renders life in the industrial districts dark, dirty and ugly to the
best and cleanest of the workpeople. Most municipalities in England
impose an extra rate on those who use gas and electricity by taking
money for the rates from those departments.

We condemn the town cottage housewife to ceaseless toil, with her dirty
doorstep and window sills, her kitchen floor, her children who play in
the street, and her intolerably swollen laundry. The glorious light of
the country summer is never seen through the smoke haze of the
industrial districts. Look down any long straight town street on any
day, and note the limit of visibility. Fogs are often caused and always
aggravated and prolonged by smoke--and after every long fog the death
rate from lung diseases goes steeply up. Among the many signs of
government incompetence, of narrow popular apathy, and lack of a true
political sense, the present riotous licence of the makers of smoke is
conspicuous. And the reform is all on Ruskin’s lines.

After dirt, drink. They are not unconnected; for the dull grey street,
the worried wife, the ill-tempered children, all tend to tempt a man to
the cosy blaze of the bar-room, and to the excitement of a shilling on
the next race. Men and women will make life interesting somehow, and if
they are denied the sound pleasures appropriate to their natures they
will find others.[120]

We will now hear the Prophet on our machine civilization. The passages
are in the famous chapter on _The Nature of Gothic_ in the Second Volume
of _The Stones of Venice_ §§ XI, XII, XIII and others. These passages
are among Ruskin’s earliest social writing. He was led from the
examination of the characters of Byzantine, Gothic and Renaissance
architecture, to inquire into the character of their builders; and so
was led from Art to Man as the subject matter of his life-work. This is
an important transition passage, written about 1850, ten years before
the decisive year when he became an economist always and an Art
Professor at intervals.

§ XI. “The modern English mind ... intensely desires in all things, the
utmost completion or perfection compatible with their nature. This is a
noble character in the abstract, but becomes ignoble when it causes us
to forget the relative dignities of that nature itself, and to prefer
the perfectness of the lower nature to the imperfection of the higher;
not considering that, as judged by such a rule, all the brute animals
would be preferable to man because more perfect in their functions and
kind, and yet are always held inferior to him, so also in the works of
man, those which are more perfect in their kind are always inferior to
those which are, in their nature, liable to more faults and
shortcomings. For the finer the nature the more flaws it will show
through the clearness of it; and it is a law of this Universe, that the
best things shall be seldomest seen in their best form. The wild grass
grows well and strongly, one year with another; but the wheat is,
according to the greater nobleness of its nature, liable to the bitterer
blight. And therefore, while in all things that we see or do, we are to
desire perfection, and strive for it, we are nevertheless not to set the
meaner thing, in its narrow accomplishment, above the nobler thing, in
its mighty progress; not to esteem smooth minuteness above shattered
majesty, not to prefer mean victory to honourable defeat; not to lower
the level of our aim, that we may the more surely enjoy the complacency
of success. But, above all, in our dealings with the souls of other men,
we are to take care how we check, by severe requirement or narrow
caution, efforts which might otherwise lead to a noble issue; and, still
more, how we withhold our admiration from great excellences, because
they are mingled with rough faults. Now, in the make and nature of every
man, however rude or simple, whom we employ in manual labour, there are
some powers for better things: some tardy imagination, torpid capacity
of emotion, tottering steps of thought, there are, even at the worst;
and in most cases it is all our own fault that they _are_ tardy or
torpid. But they cannot be strengthened, unless we are content to take
them in their feebleness, and unless we prize and honour them in their
imperfection above the best and most perfect manual skill. And this is
what we have to do with all labourers; to look for the thoughtful part
of them, and get that out of them, whatever we lose for it, whatever
faults or errors we are obliged to take with it. For the best that is in
them cannot manifest itself, but in company with much error. Understand
this clearly: You can teach a man to draw a straight line, and to cut
one; to strike a curved line and to carve it; and to copy and carve any
number of given lines or forms, with admirable speed and perfect
precision; and you find his work perfect of its kind: but if you ask him
to think about any of those forms, to consider if he cannot find any
better in his own head, he stops; his execution becomes hesitating; he
thinks, and ten to one he thinks wrong; ten to one he makes a mistake in
the first touch he gives to his work as a thinking being. But you have
made a man of him for all that. He was only a machine before, an
animated tool.”

§ XII. “And observe, you are put to stern choice in this matter. You
must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot
make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to
be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that
precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog
wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize
them. All the energy of their spirits must be given to make cogs and
compasses of themselves. All their attention and strength must go to the
accomplishment of the mean act. The eye of the soul must be bent upon
the finger point, and the soul’s force must fill all the invisible
nerves that guide it, ten hours a day, that it may not err from its
steely precision, and so soul and sight be worn away, and the whole
human being be lost at last--a heap of sawdust, so far as its
intellectual work in this world is concerned; saved only by its Heart,
which cannot go into the form of cogs and compasses, but expands, after
the ten hours are over, into fireside humanity. On the other hand if you
will make a man of the working creature, you cannot make a tool. Let him
but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth doing; and
the engine-turned precision is lost at once. Out come all his roughness,
all his dulness, all his incapability; shame upon shame, failure upon
failure, pause after pause: but out comes the whole majesty of him also;
and we know the height of it only when we see the clouds settling upon
him. And whether the clouds be bright or dark, there will be
transfiguration behind and within them.”

§ XIII. “And, now, reader, look around this English room of yours, about
which you have been proud so often, because the work of it was so good
and strong, and the ornaments so finished. Examine again all those
accurate mouldings, and perfect polishings, and unerring adjustments of
the seasoned wood and tempered steel. Many a time you have exulted over
them, and thought how great England was, because her slightest work was
done so thoroughly. Alas! if read rightly, these perfectnesses are signs
of a slavery in our England a thousand times more bitter and more
degrading than that of the scourged African or helot Greek. Men may be
beaten, chained, tormented, yoked like cattle, slaughtered like summer
flies, and yet remain, in one sense, and the best sense, free. But to
smother their souls within them, to blight and hew into rotting
pollards, the suckling branches of their human intelligence, to make the
flesh and skin, which after the worm’s work on it, is to see God, into
leathern thongs to yoke machinery with--this it is to be slave masters
indeed; and there might be more freedom in England, though her feudal
lords’ lightest words were worth men’s lives, and though the blood of
the vexed husbandman dropped in the furrows of her fields, than there is
while the animation of her multitudes is sent like fuel to feed the
factory smoke, and the strength of them is given daily to be wasted into
the fineness of a web, or racked into the exactness of a line.”

§ XV. ” ...It is not that men are ill fed, but that they have no
pleasure in the work by which they make their bread, and therefore look
to wealth as the only means of pleasure. It is not that men are pained
by the scorn of the upper classes, but they cannot endure their own; for
they feel that the kind of labour to which they are condemned is verily
a degrading one, and makes them less than men.... In all ages and in all
countries reverence has been paid and sacrifice made by men to each
other, not only without complaint but rejoicingly; and famine and peril
and sword and all evil and all shame have been borne willingly in the
causes of masters and kings; for all these gifts of the heart ennobled
the men who gave, not less than the men who received them, and nature
prompted and God rewarded the sacrifice. But to feel their souls
withering within them, unthanked, to find their whole being sunk into an
unrecognized abyss, to be counted off into a heap of mechanism, numbered
with its wheels, and weighted with its hammer strokes--this nature bade
not--this God blesses not--this humanity for no long time is able to
endure.”

§ XVI. “We have much studied, and much perfected, of late, the great
civilized invention of the Division of Labour; only we give it a false
name. It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the
men:--Divided into mere segments of men--broken into small fragments and
crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is
left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts
itself in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail. Now it is a
good and desirable thing, truly, to make many pins in a day; but if we
could only see with what crystal sand their points were polished,--sand
of human soul, much to be magnified before it can be discussed what it
is--we should think there might be some loss in it also. And the great
cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than their
furnace blast, is all in very deed for this--that we manufacture
everything there except men--we blanch cotton and strengthen steel and
refine sugar and shape pottery--but to brighten, to strengthen, to
refine or to reform a single living spirit, never enters into our
estimate of advantages. And all the evil to which that cry is urging our
myriads can be met only ... by a right understanding on the part of all
classes, of what kinds of labour are good for men, raising them, and
making them happy; by a determined sacrifice of such convenience or
beauty or cheapness as is to be got only by the degradation of the
workman, and by equally determined demand for the products and results
of healthy and ennobling labour.”

§ XVII. “And how, it will be asked, are these products to be recognized,
and this demand to be regulated? Easily: by the observance of three
broad and simple rules:

“1. Never encourage the manufacture of any article not absolutely
necessary, in the production of which Invention has no share.

“2. Never demand an exact finish for its own sake, but only for some
practical or noble end.

“3. Never encourage imitation or copying of any kind, except for the
sake of preserving records of great works.”

This magnificent passage, central as to Ruskin’s teaching and very
typical of the literary power with which his spirit was armed, is
probably of more value as a principle than as a specific cure. We can
without great difficulty obey this three precepts, and do some good
thereby. We can avoid mere meretricious glory of finish; we can choose
our purchases so as to favour originality, when we are buying articles
in gold or silver or glass or bronze or leather or porcelain or wood;
but the great mass of the evil remains untouched. How are we to
cultivate invention when we buy a mackintosh, or a pair of boots, or
common crockery, or pens and paper--and even in an article so full of
inventions as a bicycle, the invention is not due to the mechanic who
makes it. We are not really carried much beyond the æsthetic furnishings
of our existence. So far, however, the advice is excellent and human; it
is likely to lead persons of moderate means to prefer the products of
Switzerland or Japan, hand made and invented, to the machine products of
Birmingham.

There must be always a measure of tedious soul killing work to be done;
and few entirely escape it. Our professions, as well as our trades, let
alone manual occupations, do us some harm, narrow our outlook, make us
peculiar. I am told that even teachers can be recognized as such, and
the weighty medical manner is well known. You can neither serve behind a
counter nor occupy a pulpit without some of the manner of it becoming
part of yourself. Even so, the day labourer suffers from the lack of
intelligence he is called upon for. We must all find the balance outside
our work. By the reasonable shortening of hours, even the dull routine
labourer may have a chance of exercising his faculties as a man. The
fact that labour is specialized and monotonous constitutes the proper
physiological reason for the eight hour-day or shorter hours still in
some trades. Moreover, to do the dull rough work of the world, there is
no denying that there are annually born a certain number of dull but
strong people, whose gifts lie in the absence of thinking. They are born
into all classes, unfortunately; but born they are. But Ruskin is fully
alive to this solution of the ultimate difficulty, and frequently
alludes to it.

“It is in the wholesome indisposition of the average mind for
intellectual labour that due provision is made for the quantity of dull
work which must be done in stubbing the Thornaby wastes of the
world.”[121]

“I have said ... that the rough and worthless may be set to the roughest
and foulest work, and the finest to the finest; the rough and rude work
being, you will in time perceive, the best of charities to the rough and
rude people.”[122]

Moreover, a measure of routine labour is good, as recreation, for us
all--it is a relief from thinking, planning, inventing. Good spade and
hatchet work, if only one can perspire enough over it, is a condition of
good work in higher ways. Ruskin thinks so too, and set the Oxford
undergraduates to their famous road-making for exercise; surely the
greatest academic triumph a professor ever achieved.

Ruskin’s attack on Machinery, when carefully read, applies only to steam
machinery, with its soot, smoke, sulphurous gases and noise. Wind or
water power he allows and encourages; a vast scheme of mills worked by
tidal water power is outlined in _Fors_.[123] And oddly enough he
prophesies, so long ago, that electricity will supersede steam; and
therefore if we can generate electrical energy with very much less
publicly vomited smoke than we now make for steam power, we shall be on
right lines, and shall have the Master’s goodwill. Not by vain
retrogression, but by determined reforms on possible lines may we some
day get back an England good to live in. At present we are wasteful and
dirty, and we do not care.

Ruskin writes: “What is required of the members of St. George’s Company
is, not that they should never travel by railroads, nor that they
should abjure machinery, but that they should never travel
unnecessarily, or in wanton haste; and that they should never do with a
machine what can be done with hands and arms, while hands and arms are
idle.”[124]

There is no subject which causes more merriment amongst the Philistines
than Ruskin’s objection to railways, combined with the frequent
locomotion indulged in by his most devoted followers. But Ruskin’s
objection to railways was never so absolute as was popularly supposed.
He always approved of them on through main routes, and only objected to
their intrusion into the peace of quiet valleys off the main tracks. He
objected to what appeared to him the excessive provision by which a
lovely valley was spoiled “in order that every fool in Buxton could be
in Bakewell in half an hour.” We must remember that the railway mania of
1844 occurred when Ruskin was five and twenty, at the formative period
of his life, and that he saw all around him rough destruction of that
beauty which affected his soul with a thrill like a lover’s (as he tells
us in the Third Volume of _Modern Painters_, pages 295-298, quoted in
Chapter I). The countryside must have been sadly ruined in the forties,
while the railway embankments were creeping along through the pastures.

Possibly not all of us know the remarkable passage in the _Cestus of
Aglaia_ in praise of a locomotive:[125]

“I cannot express the amazed awe, the crushed humility, with which I
sometimes watch a locomotive take its breath at a railway station, and
think what work there is in its bars and wheels, and what manner of men
they must be who dig brown ironstone out of the ground, and forge it
into that! What assemblage of accurate and mighty faculties in them;
more than fleshly power over melting crag and coiling fire, fettered,
and finessed at last into the precision of watchmaking; Titanian
hammer-strokes beating, out of lava, these glittering cylinders and
timely-respondent valves, and fine ribbed rods, which touch each other
as a serpent writhes, in noiseless gliding, and omnipotence of grasp;
infinitely complex anatomy of active steel, compared with which the
skeleton of a living creature would seem, to a careless observer, clumsy
and vile--a mere morbid secretion and phosphatous drop of flesh! What
would the men who thought out this--who beat it out, who touched it
into its polished calm of power, who set it to its appointed task, and
triumphantly saw it fulfil this task to the utmost of their will, feel
or think about this weak hand of mine, timidly leading a little stain of
shadow of something else--mere failure in every motion, and endless
disappointment; what, I repeat, would these Iron-dominant Genii think of
me? and what ought I to think of them?

“But as I reach this point of reverence, the unreasonable thing is sure
to give a shriek as of a thousand unanimous vultures, which leaves me
shuddering in real physical pain for some half minute following; and
assures me, during slow recovery, that a people which can endure such
fluting and piping among them is not likely soon to have its modest ear
pleased by aught of oaten stop, or pastoral song. Perhaps I am then led
on into meditation respecting the spiritual nature of the Tenth Muse,
who invented this gracious instrument, and guides its modulation by
stokers’ fingers; meditation, also, as to the influence of her invention
amidst the other parts of the Parnassian melody of English education.”

He further concedes that “steam, or any mode of heat power, may only be
employed, justifiably, under extreme or special conditions of need; and
for speed on main lines of communication, and raising water from great
depths, or other such work beyond human strength.” This is a very large
concession, and may be received with large gratitude. He even permits
steam machinery for such purposes as “the deepening of large river
channels; changing the surfaces of mountainous districts; irrigating
tracts of desert in the torrid zone; breaking up and thus rendering
capable of quicker fusion, edges of ice in the northern and southern
Arctic seas, etc., so rendering parts of the earth habitable, which
hitherto have been lifeless.”[126]

The teaching of Ruskin is not really revolutionary in immediate
practice; he advises a manufacturer to go on using his machinery; he
merely wants us to set our faces towards the restoration of nature’s
gifts of beauty and peace to the lives of toilers; and for ceasing to
uproot sentiments of cleanliness, reverence and order by unnatural,
foul, crowded and vulgar surroundings. His tastes and instincts are
vehemently against machinery; but his actual requirings are moderate.

It is the machine-made society we live in that distresses him, and
distresses us; its occasional rough coarseness, its physical ill-health.
There are, of course, scattered through _Fors_ many outbursts against
machinery in general, not so carefully limited as his more weighty
pronouncements. In Letter V, pp. 10, 11, for instance, the assertion is
made that a man and his family can, by their own labour, given land,
feed and clothe themselves without machinery; and that therefore all
labour-saving appliances are so many aids to idleness. I do not know
where is the proof or disproof of the assertion. All we know is that
savage tribes do so live, but no others, and that it is in the time and
strength saved from labour for sheer food and clothing that the best
activities of humanity find room: and that civilization began with the
existence of a leisured class.

And now, turning to the human product of industrialism, we will take a
sober view, not debiting to the factory system the evils which are
inherent in human nature, but only those due to crowded town life and to
employment in large rooms full of noisy machinery. If we have cured the
smoke evil, and reduced hours to their present reasonable length, what
remains to be done, and will it be on Ruskin’s lines?

South Lancashire is often taken as the type of industrial England. There
I was born and brought up, and I have lived there for the greater part
of my life. I have known very intimately a great many of the working
people. They are far more pale and undersized than they ought to be.
Their beauty has been taken from them. The half-time system, now
perishing, has interfered with their education. The damp atmosphere in
the hot rooms is bad for their lungs, and minding machines is utterly
monotonous. But they are excellent people--they will stand comparison
with the upper classes. There is every type, of course, they are as
varied as are men at the Universities, or as the ladies who go to any
Church. But, speaking as we must, in general, there is a level of
conduct and intelligence in those mean streets, not different except in
manner from that of the suburbs. The degeneracy is, I believe, only
physical, so far as it is to be debited to the conditions of their work.

This bad physique is a real evil. The lack of room for cricket and
football, the remoteness of the fields and woods, the ugliness of the
grey streets, the lack of quiet, added to the humid factories and the
smoke, have produced this. Parks and playgrounds and all sorts of open
spaces, including extensive fields and woods and ponds accessible on a
half-holiday, should be provided far more than they have been, and
should be less doctored by parks’ superintendents.

Then there is a great sphere of service open to the familiar agencies
for good. The Drink traffic should be curtailed, and put out of the
reach of private profit, and better opportunities for sociability, music
and dancing, provided, not as part of the bait of the drink seller, but
by a democratic municipality. The usefulness of picture galleries will
not be fully reached till oral teaching about the pictures is added, and
the great educational value of comparatively cheap coloured
reproductions is perceived. Into the work of founding the Art Museum in
Ancoats, a working class district of Manchester, on exactly these lines,
Mr. Ruskin threw himself heartily. It was indeed an inspiration derived
from his writings by Mr. T. C. Horsfall which caused that Museum to be
founded. It has recently been taken over by the Corporation.

Solemnly, then, and with due fear and doubt, considering the horror and
difficulty of the case, let us resolutely set ourselves to see if, under
the world of machinery, we can live good and healthy lives. The present
products of our civilization are far from satisfactory to any of us. Are
the crowds of girls who rush forth from the factory when the hour of
freedom strikes, having pieced threads in a hot damp atmosphere, and
shouted across the whirl of wheels all day to one another--are they on
the way to make fit, self-respecting and physically strong wives and
mothers and trainers of children? There are some three hundred thousand
of these girls in the Lancashire factories, who will be mothers of a
million English babies. Or take the young men. Go by a football train on
a Saturday afternoon, when holiday is written on every bloomless and
vulgar and swaggering young face:--what do you hear and see as you crowd
fifteen to a carriage? Bets, ribaldry, ill nature, the carriage floor a
mess, the whole scene an explosion of pent-up spirits of self-assertion
and banal hilarity.[127]

These young people are undoubtedly products of the age of machinery; but
for machine production they would never have been born, nor their
surroundings formed; but the question is, cannot their tastes and
characters be reformed even while they remain machine-hands? Are not
excellent lives possible, and healthy surroundings obtainable, in
industrial England? For factory life we can confidently point to such.
Bournville, New Earswick, Port Sunlight, and of an earlier date,
Saltaire, Bessbrook, and some other centres which have not a special
local name, show that the thing can be done. For colliers the case is
harder. There are colliery villages on the Tyne which once ran extension
lectures; but the villages themselves are horrible. There are good
colliery villages near Doncaster, one built round a private Park.
Collieries have special difficulties. The coal mine will not last for
ever; and when it is worked out the houses may become useless. They are
therefore built to last only for from thirty to fifty years. They are
erected all at one time; and large rows of houses exactly alike are the
cheapest. They are often outside any municipality with its possibly
watchful surveyor and inspectors. They are completely owned by the
colliery company, which has no competitor as landlord. It is the classic
case in England of the failure of pure competition to care for human
welfare.



_EPILOGUE_


I am kindly permitted by the Council of the Society for Psychical
Research to reprint here the beautiful tribute by F. W. H. Myers, which
appeared in their _Journal_ for March, 1900; and has been reprinted in
Mr. Myers’s _Fragments of Prose and Poetry_, pp. 89-94.

    Ω οὗτος, οὗτος, Οίδίπους, τί μέλλομεν
    χωρείν; πάλαι δἠ τάπὀ σοῦ βραδύνεται

Ruskin, then, has sunk to rest. The bracken and bilberries of the
Lake-land which he loved so well have hidden the mortal shape of the
greatest man of letters, the loftiest influence which earth still
retained;--have enwrapped “the man dear to the Muses, and by the Nymphs
not unbeloved"--

    τὀν Μώσαις ϕίλον ἀνδρα, τὀν οὐ Νὐμϕαίσιν ἀπεϰθῆ

We may rejoice that the long waiting is over; but memory all the more
“goes slipping back to that delightful time” when he was with us in his
force and fire; when it was still granted to hearken to his utterance;
to feel the germ of virtue quickened by his benignant soul. For those
who had the privilege of knowing Ruskin, the author came second to the
man; and in this brief notice of his Honorary Membership of our Society
I may perhaps be pardoned if I dwell in reminiscence, without attempting
any formal review.

I met him first in my own earliest home, beneath the spurs of
Skiddaw,--its long slopes “bronzed with deepest radiance,” as the boy
Wordsworth had seen them long since in even such an evening’s glow.
Since early morning Ruskin had lain and wandered in the folds and
hollows of the hill; and he came back grave as from a solemn service
from day-long gazing on the heather and the blue. Later came many
another scene;--pacings in the Old Court of Trinity with Edmund Gurney,
who met those generous paradoxes with humorous play; graver hours at
Oxford, in the sick-room of the Duke of Albany, who, coming back to
earth-life from perilous illness, found nowhere a guidance fitter than
Ruskin’s for eager and royal youth.

But chiefliest I think of him in that home of high thoughts where his
interest in our inquiry first upgrew. For the introduction to the new
hope came to him, as to Edmund Gurney and to myself, through a lady whom
each of us held in equal honour; and it was on the stately lawns of
Broadlands, and in that air as of Sabbatical repose, that Ruskin enjoyed
his one brief season,--since the failure of his youthful Christian
confidence--of blissful trust in the Unseen. To one among that company a
vision came, as of a longed-for meeting of souls beloved in heaven, a
vision whose detail and symbolism carried conviction to Ruskin’s heart.
While that conviction abode with him he was happy as a child; but
presently he suffered what all are like to suffer who do not keep their
minds close pressed to actual evidence by continuous study. That impress
faded; and leaving the unseen world in its old sad uncertainty, he went
back to the mission which was laid on him,--that mission of humanizing
this earth, and being humanized thereby, which our race must needs
accomplish, whatever be the last doom of man.

    Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
    Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind;
    And even with something of a Mother’s mind
          And no unworthy aim,
          The homely Nurse doth all she can
    To make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man,
          Forget the glories he hath known,
    And that imperial palace whence he came.

But Ruskin’s task,--however it might be pursued in forgetfulness of that
unrememberable home,--was surely still the task (as Bacon called it) “to
prepare and adorn the bride-chamber of the mind and the universe”; and
that _melior natura_ which seemed to be Ruskin’s, as it was Bacon’s,
divinity has never shone more radiantly upon the inward shrine of any
lover of men. It was half in jest that I would complain to him that to
Earth he gave up what was meant for Infinity, and bent a cosmic passion
upon this round wet pebble of rock and sea. “Ah, my friend!” he answered
once when I spoke of life to come, “if you could only give me fifty
years longer of this life on earth, I would ask for nothing more!” And
half that season was granted to him, and all in vain;--for what Tithonus
may tread for ever unweary the “gleaming halls of Morn”?

Then as that fervent life wore on, Ruskin turned more and more from the
outward pageant to the human passion; from Alp and sunset to the sterner
beauty of moral law. From the publication of _Unto This Last_, one may
trace that slow-growing revolt against the Age which led him to preach
in the end with such despairing emphasis the duty of protest, of
renunciation, of sheer self-severance from most of the tendencies of
modern life. The strength of this emotion in him was made, I remember,
strangely plain on one occasion, when some of those who cared most for
him had clubbed together, at Lord Mount-Temple’s suggestion, to surprise
him, on his recovery from a serious illness, with the present of a
picture of Turner’s, which he had once possessed and still dearly loved,
but of which he had despoiled himself to meet some generous impulse.
Never were givers more taken aback by the issue of their gift. For the
sudden sight of the lovely landscape hung in his bedroom drew from him a
letter of almost heart-broken pain,--at the thought that those whom he
would so fain have helped,--who were thus willing to do this thing, or
almost anything, to please him,--were yet not willing to do that other
thing for their own souls’ sake;--to come out from the iniquity,--to
shake off the baseness of the age,--to bind themselves in the St.
George’s Guild with that small remnant who clung to things pure and
true.

Indeed, there was something naïve, something childlike, in his
Brotherhoods, his Leagues, his solemn Covenants against the onflowing
tide of things;--but a stern reality beneath all this became strongly
present to us then;--a deep compassion for the lonely heart, which so
much needed love, yet could scarcely accept a fellowship in love which
was not also a fellowship in all that he held for virtue.

There are some who fear lest too pervading a belief in that other world
may make men indifferent to the loveliness and irresponsive to the woes
of _this_. Yet must that needs be so? or might we not treat even this
world’s problems with steadier heart, could we regain,--from some surer
foothold in the Invisible,--that ancient serenity of the Saints?
Watching that ardent soul, whose very raptures trembled on the brink of
pain, I have thought that even from Ruskin’s delight in Nature something
of a bitter yearning might have been soothed away, could he have seen in
stream and moorland, nay even in

          great Skiddaw’s self, who shrouds
    His double head among Atlantic clouds,
    And pours forth streams more sweet than Castaly;--

could he have seen, I say, in these, as Plato saw in Castaly or in
Hymettus, only the transitory adumbration and perishing symbol of
somewhat more enduring and more fair. Nay, even from his compassion for
stunted and erring souls might not the burning pain have gone, could he
have seen those souls as Er the Paphlagonian saw them, marshalled in an
everlasting order, of which but a moment’s glimpse is shown;--till even
“this last” of men shall follow out, through all vicissitude, his
endless and his mounting way?

And turning then, with heart full of such-like fancies, to that
well-loved Leader’s fate;--imagining his baffled isolation, and the
disheartenment of solitary years;--I have pictured him waiting in the
Coniston woodlands, as Œdipus in Colonus’ grove,--waiting in mournful
memory, in uncomplaining calm--till he should hear at last the august
summons,--nay, sounded it not like the loving banter?--of the unguessed
accompanying God. “Come, Œdipus, why linger on our journey? Thou hast
kept me waiting long.”



INDEX


Abbey Dale, land at, 163

Alexander, Francesca, 52

Ancoats Art Museum, 255

Aristocracy, 135, 142

Artistical Pharisaism, 70

Assisi, 48

Authority in Religion, 67


Bacon on Usury, 189, 197

Baker, George, 74, 163

Baptism, 66

Bastiat, 189, 190

Beever, Miss, 50, 52

Bequest limited, 188, 189

Bible not the word of God, 62;
  on Usury, 194, 196

Bishop of Manchester, 201, 202

Bishops, 60, 61, 141, 142

Breaking the Sabbath, 31

Broadlands, 48, 261

Builders’ Parliament, 155, 156


Capitalists and War, 203

_Cestus of Aglaia_, quoted on locomotive, 250, 251

Christ’s sheep, 65, 67

Church, 64;
  discipline, 68

Claughton, land at, 163

Clergy, 55-61, 138

Coal, 233

Coinage under St. George, 166

Cole, Mr. G. H. D., 152, 157, 158

Communist colonies, 133

Competition allowed, 140

_Crown of Wild Olive_, Lecture on War analysed, 204-210;
  Appendix to, quoted, 210-213


Democracy, 158

Division of labour, 227-230

Doukhobors, 133, 199

Duke, 142

Dull work, 246-248


_Eagle’s Nest_, quoted from, 41, 42, 67, 74

_Ethics of the Dust_, 63


Factory System, 136

Farming, 226, 227

Fawcett, Mrs., 189

_Fors Clavigera_, quoted _passim_, 131-132;
  passages on War, 214-218

Franco-German War, 204, 215, 216, 218

Friar’s Crag, 27


Garden Cities and Villages, 173, 257

Giotto at Assisi, 48

_Gold_, 85

Guild of St. George, 23;
  _General Statement of_, quoted, 64, 65;
  fifty years ago, 159;
  Creed of, 161, 162;
  land holding, 163;
  annual meetings, 164;
  officials, 178, 179, 263

Guild Socialism, 139, 151-156

Guilds, 122, 124, 139


Horsfall, T. C., 255


Individualism, 148, 149

Industrial society, 253, 254, 256

Infallibility, 24

Interest, bound up with private property, 187

Irreligious painters at Venice, 32


Labour, 126

Lady Mount Temple, 49

Land cultivation, 170

Land tenure, 137;
  in Ireland, 174

Law of supply and demand, 92

Lawyers’ fees, 61

_Lectures on Art_, quoted from, 46, 47

_Letters to the Clergy_, 66

Locomotive, praise of, 250, 251

Lord Mount Temple, 48, 263

_Love’s Meinie_, quoted, 172

Luxmore, H. E., 164


Machinery, 230-232

Marriages in _Time and Tide_, 169

Marshall, Prof., quoted, 93-98

Mill, J. S., 37, 78-119;
  _Principles_, 86, 87;
  chapters on social well-being, 88, 98-102;
  his career, like Ruskin’s, 102-105

Milner, Dennis, 183, 184

_Modern Painters_, Vol. II, 34;
  Vol. III, quoted, 68-71

Mr. Molyneux, 29

_Munera Pulveris_, quoted, 89, 128, 159, 185, 203

Museum at Sheffield, 164, 172

Myers, F. W. H., 49, 52, 259


Nationalization of Schools, 120;
  of workshops, 121;
  of Railways, 124

_Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds_, 35;
  quoted, 59, 60, 62, 64, 65-68


Oaths, 73

Old Age Pensions, 123

_On the Old Road_, quoted, 51, 64, 66


Parents of Ruskin, 26, 27

Pastoral happiness, 222-225

Payment of Clergy, 68

Peasantry in Europe, 224;
  in England, 225

Plato, 138, 197

Political Economy, orthodox science of, 78-81;
  Theory of Value, 82;
  connection with morality, 82;
  Ruskin’s definition of, 89;
  the “economic man,” 106-109;
  definition of Wealth, 109, 110

Population, 137

Position of William, 189-193

Prayer Books, 66

Present duty of a Ruskinian, 179, 180

Priesthood, 57, 62

Prodigal Son, 29

Professional men as officials, 180-182


Quakerism and Ruskin, 71-77

_Queen of the Air_, quoted from, 43-45


Railways, 249-252

Religious art, 68

Rents under St. George, 167

Ricardo, 86, 91

Rich, 115, 116

Rose La Touche, 38, 261

RUSKIN--
  Aristocrat, 159
  Art teaching, 10
  Attack on clergy, 55-61
  Career like Mill’s, 102-105
  Conservative, 222
  Definition of wealth, 115
  Divine, A, 19, 21
  Epochs of religious change, 31, 32, 47-50;
    at Venice in 1876, 50
  Free trader, 83, 84
  Guild of St. George, 165
  Imperialist, 209, 220
  Inconsistency, on war, 210-212
  Inflammation of the brain, 23
  Later views on Usury, 185, 187, 188
  Mature period in religion, 47
  Mill (and), 78-119
  Museum, 164
  Neglect of, 9
  Peace advocate, 219
  Political Economy of, 89, 117
  Practical proposals, 120-150
  Professor, 178
  Quakerism, 55-77
  Qualifications of, 15
  Religious history, 26-54
  Religious Research Fellowship, 53
  Sacrifice of reputation, 17, 22, 37
  Selflessness of, 13, 14
  Signs of a Prophet, 11-25
  Sincerity of, 12
  Singlemindedness of, 13
  Socialist, 134
  Style of, 18
  Subjects of works, 18
  Suffering, 38
  Susceptible to landscape beauty in childhood, 11, 20
  Talk on Quakerism, 74-76
  Three Religious Periods, 36
  Twenty-six chapters, 26, 40
  Utopia, 132, 143, 147
  War, 73
  Weaknesses, 24


Sacrament, 66

_Sartor Resartus_, 206

Schools, 120, 175-178

_Sesame and Lilies_, quoted, 101

Shakers, 133

Shakespeare, 46

Shepherds in practice, 226

Sillar, W. C., 185, 186

Small Holdings, 171, 172

Smoke, 234-236;
  passages in Ruskin on, 237

Society for Psychical Research, 49

Sparkes, Malcolm, 155, 157

Starvation, to be guarded against, 182-184

Statesmen in the North, 223, 224

Steam machinery, 248

_Stones of Venice_, quoted, 83, 113, 237-245

_Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century_, 234

Sweated Industries Act, 128


Talbot, Mrs., 163

_The Nature of Gothic_, quoted, 237-245

Thomson, George, 164

_Time and Tide_, quoted, 84, 137, 139, 142, 147, 169, 175, 201


Unemployed, the, 122

_Unto this Last_, quoted, 84, 88, 91, 113-118, 120, 121, 124, 125, 139

Usury, 185-199;
  references to, 193;
  authorities against, 194-197;
  as private money-lending, 198;
  as modern investment, 197, 198


Violence, 143

Vivisection, 46


Wages, 124-127, 129, 130

Wages Fund, 86, 87, 126, 127

Wallace, A. R., 182

Waldensian Service at Turin, 31

War, 136, 203-221;
  and capital, 203;
  and character, 212-214

Wardle, William, 164

Wealth, definition of, 109, 110, 113, 114;
  Ruskin’s definition, 115;
  upper limit to, 135, 168, 199-201

Welfare work, 173, 174

Wesley, John, on Usury, 197, 198

Whitley Councils, 154, 156

Word of God, 63

Works of the First Religious Period, 28, 35

Works of the Second Religious Period, 39

Workshops, 121;
  by Government, 121, 122;
  under Guilds, 122, 124

_Printed in Great Britain by_

UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, THE GRESHAM PRESS, WOKING AND LONDON


FOOTNOTES:

 [1] Chap. xiv. § 19.

 [2] _Fors_, Letter LXXXVI.

 [3] _Rugby Chapel_, by M. Arnold.

 [4] The passages were: Exod. xv, xx; 2 Sam. i. 17; 1 Kings viii; Ps.
 xxiii, xxxii, xc, xci, ciii, cxii, cxix, cxxxix; Prov. ii, iii, viii,
 xii; Is. lviii; Matt. v, vi, vii; Acts xxvi; 1 Cor. xiii, xv; James
 iv; Rev. v, vi. See _Præterita_ for all this.

 [5] For his actual experience of prayer, see the incident of 1845 in
 _Præterita_, vol. ii. pp. 260, 261.

 [6] _Præterita_, iii. 28.

 [7] _Præterita_, III. i. 32-34. Also referred to in _Munera Pulveris_,
 App. V.

 [8] _Præterita_, vol. iii. p. 39.

 [9] Id. p. 41.

 [10] Id. p. 48.

 [11] _Præterita_, vol. iii. pp. 44-6. _Fors_, Letter LXXVI.

 [12] _Fors_, Letter LXXVI.

 [13] Letter XII, p. 3.

 [14] Notably in the address and Turner drawing presented by
 distinguished men on his 80th birthday.

 [15] _Fors_, Letter XLII.

 [16] Pp. 189-190.

 [17] _Lectures on Art_, p. 50.

 [18] _Lectures on Art_, p. 52.

 [19] See _Fors_, LXXVI, March 1877, vol. iv. p. 69.

 [20] See Epilogue.

 [21] Letter LXIII, vol. vi. p. 89.

 [22] _Fors_, Letter LXI, p. 7, note.

 [23] See also _Fors_, Letter LXVI, vol. vi. p. 172.

 [24] _On the Old Road_, vol. ii. p. 388.

 [25] _Fors_, XCII, 1883.

 [26] Id. XCII, vol. viii. p. 205.

 [27] This reference is known to refer chiefly to Francesca Alexander
 and her mother at Florence. Not improbably, also, to the Misses Beever
 at Coniston.

 [28] Letter XLIX.

 [29] Letter LV.

 [30] _Fors_, Letter LXXV, § 21. Notes and Correspondence.

 [31] _Time and Tide_, p. 71.

 [32] _Sheepfolds_, p. 269.

 [33] _Fors_, Letter XXXI, § 18, and also Letter LXVII, § 10.

 [34] _Sheepfolds_, p. 271.

 [35] _Fors_, Letter XXXV, § 3.

 [36] See also _Fors_, Letter LXV and Letter XLIV, also Letter XL for
 an amusing account of the edifying Bible story of Joab and Abner; and
 very numerous other passages.

 [37] _Fors_, Letter XXXVI, § 3.

 [38] _On the Old Road_, vol. ii. p. 253.

 [39] _General Statement as to the Nature and Purpose of the St.
 George’s Guild_, p. 12, 1882.

 [40] _Sheepfolds_: in _On the Old Road_, vol. ii. p. 259.

 [41] _Sheepfolds_, p. 259.

 [42] _Sheepfolds_, p. 267.

 [43] _Sheepfolds_, p. 283.

 [44] _Modern Painters_, vol. iii. p. 57 (iv. 4) (1856).

 [45] _Crown of Wild Olive_, Introduction, p. 17.

 [46] _Fors_, Letter XX.

 [47] _Eagle’s Nest_, p. 139.

 [48] _Unto This Last_, Libr. ed. § 53, _n._, small ed. p. 97, and
 _Stones of Venice_, iii. 168. This last passage was written just after
 the Repeal of the Corn Laws, when the question was hot.

 [49] _Time and Tide_, Letter I, p. 5.

 [50] _Unto This Last_, p. 97 _n._

 [51] See the privately printed Dialogue on _Gold_; Library ed. vol.
 xvii. p. 491, written in 1863, and the letter to _The Times_, on p.
 489.

 [52] _Unto This Last_, Libr. ed. § 58, small ed. pp. 109, 110.

 [53] _Unto This Last_, § 60, small ed. p. 114.

 [54] _Unto This Last_, Libr. ed. § 55, small ed. p. 103. See also § 1.

 [55] Letter to Dr. John Brown, Libr. ed. vol. xvii. p. lxxxii.

 [56] Note to _A Disciple of Plato_, by Wm. Smart, p. 48, Libr. ed.,
 xviii, lxxxiii.

 [57] _Principles of Economics_, Bk. I. chap. vii. § 3.

 [58] Book iv. § 28.

 [59] _Sesame and Lilies_, i. 42.

 [60] _Unsettled Questions of Political Economy_, Essay V, 1884, and
 earlier in the _Westminster Review_.

 [61] _Unto This Last_, small ed. p. 114.

 [62] _Unto This Last_, §§ 61-64, Libr. ed.; small ed. pp. 118-127.

 [63] _Unto This Last_, § 65, or p. 128.

 [64] _Unto This Last_, § 27, or p. 40.

 [65] _Unto This Last_, § 29, or pp. 43, 44.

 [66] See in continuation of this the Apologue of the two sailors:
 _Unto This Last_, pp. 49-57 or § 33-7.

 [67] _Unto This Last_, Libr. ed. § 28, or pp. 41, 42 in small ed.

 [68] _Unto This Last_, § 77, or p. 156.

 [69] _Unto this Last_, Preface, p. 7.

 [70] By Graham Wallas, in his book with that title. See later in this
 chapter on Ruskin’s Bishops, p. 141.

 [71] _Unto This Last_, § 79, n.

 [72] _Munera Pulveris_, § 128.

 [73] _Unto This Last_, § 53, small ed. pp. 96-8.

 [74] Malthus.

 [75] Ricardo and James Mill.

 [76] Ruskin’s disciple, the late Professor Wm. Smart of Glasgow, has
 written a book to show that there may be no supply price to wages.

 [77] See _Arrows of the Chace_, ii. 97.

 [78] John Ruskin, _Social Reformer_, p. 138.

 [79] _Time and Tide_, Letter XX, § 124.

 [80] _Fors_, LXXXIX, p. 135. But _v._ pp. 182-4 below.

 [81] Letter XVIII.

 [82] _Time and Tide_, p. 19.

 [83] The literature of the Guild movement is considerable and growing.
 Mr. G. H. D. Cole has written _The World of Labour_, _Labour in War
 Time_, _Self Government in Industry_, _Labour in the Commonwealth_,
 and _Chaos and Order in Industry_, and edits _The Guildsman_ (office
 of the National Guilds League, 39 Cursitor Street, London, E.C. 4).
 Mr. A. R. Orage has written _National Guilds_, _The Alphabet of
 Economics_, and written much in his paper, _The New Age_; and Mr. S.
 G. Hobson has written _National Guilds_.

 [84] For a full account of this remarkable story see a pamphlet issued
 by the Garton Foundation, 36 Dean’s Yard, Westminster, 1s., entitled
 _The Industrial Council for the Building Industry_.

 [85] § 129-133, and also _Time and Tide_, § 105; _Crown of Wild
 Olive_, § 119; _Cestus of Aglaia_, § 55.

 [86] See _Fors_, vol. viii. p. 231.

 [87] _Fors_, Letter LVIII, vol. v. p. 273.

 [88] Cf. the Preface to _Unto This Last_, referred to in chap. v.
 above.

 [89] See _Fors_, Letters LVIII and LXIII.

 [90] _The Wonderful Century_, chap. xx.

 [91] _A Reasonable Revolution_, by Bertram Pickard (George Allen &
 Unwin, Ltd.).

 [92] P. 115.

 [93] In pamphlets enumerated in Libr. ed. vol. xvii. p. 220, _n_.

 [94] See _The Ethics of Usury and Interest_, by Rev. W. Blissard
 (George Allen & Unwin), 2s. 6d. net.

 [95] The numbers which are devoted to lengthy treatment of Usury are:
 Letters I, XVIII, p. 17, XXI, pp. 15-18, XLIII, pp. 153-7, LIII,
 142-5, LXVIII, 245-53, LXX, 312-33, LXXVIII and LXXX, and _Arrows of
 the Chace_, ii. 103. There is also a long discussion on the subject
 with Bishop Fraser of Manchester in _On the Old Road_, vol. ii. pp.
 202-245, reprinted from the _Contemporary Review_.

 [96] See list in Libr. edn. vol. xxvii. Introd. p. xlvii.

 [97] _Time and Tide_, pp. 12, 13, small ed.

 [98] Preface to _Munera Pulveris_, p. xxvi.

 [99] § 94.

 [100] § 98.

 [101] § 102.

 [102] § 115.

 [103] § 116.

 [104] Sir Herbert Edwardes.

 [105] LXXIV, vol. vii. p. 42.

 [106] LXXIV, vol. vii. p. 42.

 [107] Vol. vii. p. 344.

 [108] Letter II, p. 17.

 [109] _Fors Clavigera_, vol. i. Letter IV, p. 18.

 [110] Letter VII, p. 16.

 [111] Letter VII, p. 21. See also Letter XIV, p. 18.

 [112] Letter XXXIII, p. 24. See also Letter XXXVII, pp. 19-23. LXV, p.
 148. LXVII, p. 240. LXXIX, p. 183.

 [113] XLIV, p. 178.

 [114] See also _Munera Pulveris_, p. 46.

 [115] § 159.

 [116] _Hawkshead_, by H. S. Cowper.

 [117] v. _The Rural Labourer_, by Mr. and Mrs. Hammond.

 [118] This explanation of the Storm Cloud I gave in my book on Smoke,
 _The Destruction of Daylight_ (1907, now out of print). It was
 accepted by the Editors of the Library Edition of Ruskin’s works. Vol.
 xxxiv. p. xxvi.

 [119] A Local Government Board Departmental Committee was sitting on
 this before the war. It has resumed its sittings under the Ministry of
 Health.

 [120] Other passages on Smoke may be found in _Fors_, Letter XLIV,
 § 13; Letter XLVI, § 10; Letter LX, § 3; Letter LXXXI, § 17 (in a
 letter from Mr. Horsfall); in a youthful reference in _The Poetry of
 Architecture_, chap. v. § 63; _Modern Painters_, vol. iii. chap. 13. §
 14; vol. v. pt. ix. § 24; _The Queen of the Air_, Preface (a beautiful
 passage) and I. 8; _Ariadne Florentina_, vi. § 221; S. Mark’s Rest,
 vi. § 76; _The Art of England_, vi. § 184 (a strong passage); _Aratra
 Pentelici_, iv. § 132; _Arrows of the Chace_, ii. p. 181; Letter
 printed in Library ed., vol. xxix. pp. 574-6, called “Morning Thoughts
 at Geneva,” intended for _Fors_.

 [121] _Fors_, XCV, vol. viii. p. 258.

 [122] Id., LXXXXII, vol. vii. p. 306. A similar solution is outlined
 in Letter XVIII of _Time and Tide_.

 [123] Letter LI, p. 85.

 [124] _Fors_, Letter XLIV.

 [125] Library ed. vol. xix. p. 61.

 [126] _Munera Pulveris_, i. p. 16.

 [127] _Fors_, xi. pp. 3-7, on the navvies on the way to Furness Abbey.


Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:

gathering hinself into=> gathering himself into {pg 30}

from other notives=> from other motives {pg 80}

were comparativelty uninstructed=> were comparatively uninstructed {pg
169}





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