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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER VII

USURY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thus far Bastiat: Ruskin comments:—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER VIII

WAR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Methinks it sounds not unlike a Peace Address.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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