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 “illth” 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

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

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.