CHAPTER III

TO WHAT FOLD?

“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:

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

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.