of weights and measures in different parts of the kingdom, he, by a
law, commanded all measures of corn, and other dry goods, as also of
liquors, to be exactly the same in all his dominions; and that the
rim of each of these measures should be a circle of iron. By another
law, he commanded all cloth to be woven two yards in breadth within
the lists, and of equal goodness in all parts; and that all cloth
which did not answer this description should be seized and burnt. He
enacted, further, that all the coin of the kingdom should be exactly
of the same weight and fineness;--that no Christian should take any
interest for money lent; and, to prevent the extortions of the Jews,
he commanded that all compacts between Christians and Jews should
be made in the presence of witnesses, and the conditions of them
put in writing." So, you see, in Coeur-de-Lion's day, it was not
esteemed of absolute necessity to put agreements between Christians
in writing! Which if it were not now, you know we might save a great
deal of money, and discharge some of our workmen round Temple Bar,
as well as from Woolwich Dockyards. Note also that bit about interest
of money also for future reference. In the next place observe that
this King had great objection to thieves--at least to any person whom
he clearly comprehended to be a thief. He was the inventor of a mode
of treatment which I believe the Americans--among whom it has not
fallen altogether into disuse--do not gratefully enough recognize as
a Monarchical institution. By the last of the laws for the government
of his fleet in his expedition to Palestine, it is decreed,--"That
whosoever is convicted of theft shall have his head shaved, melted
pitch poured upon it, and the feathers from a pillow shaken over
it, that he may be known; and shall be put on shore on the first
land which the ship touches." And not only so; he even objected to
any theft by misrepresentation or deception,--for being evidently
particularly interested, like Mr. Mill, in that cloth manufacture,
and having made the above law about the breadth of the web, which has
caused it to be spoken of ever since as "Broad Cloth," and besides,
for better preservation of its breadth, enacted that the Ell shall be
of the same length all over the kingdom, and that it shall be made of
iron--(so that Mr. Tennyson's provision for National defences--that
every shop-boy should strike with his cheating yard-wand home, would
be mended much by the substitution of King Richard's honest ell-wand,
and for once with advisable encouragement to the iron trade)--King
Richard finally declares--"That it shall be of the same goodness
in the middle as at the sides, and that no merchant in any part of
the kingdom of England shall stretch before his shop or booth a red
or black cloth, or any other thing by which the sight of buyers is
frequently deceived in the choice of good cloth."
These being Richard's rough and unreasonable, chancing nevertheless,
being wholly honest, to be wholly right, notions of business, the
next point you are to note in him is his unreasonable good humour;
an eminent character of English Squires; a very loveable one; and
available to himself and others in many ways, but not altogether
so exemplary as many think it. If you are unscrupulously resolved,
whenever you can get your own way, to take it; if you are in a
position of life wherein you can get a good deal of it, and if you have
pugnacity enough to enjoy fighting with anybody who will not give it
to you, there is little reason why you should ever be out of humour,
unless indeed your way is a broad one, wherein you are like to be
opposed in force. Richard's way was a very narrow one. To be first
in battle, (generally obtaining that main piece of his will without
question; once only worsted, by a French knight, and then, not at
all good-humouredly,) to be first in recognized command--therefore
contending with his father, who was both in wisdom and acknowledged
place superior; but scarcely contending at all with his brother
John, who was as definitely and deeply beneath him; good-humoured
unreasonably, while he was killing his father, the best of kings,
and letting his brother rule unresisted, who was among the worst;
and only proposing for his object in life to enjoy himself everywhere
in a chivalrous, poetical, and pleasantly animal manner, as a strong
man always may. What should he have been out of humour for? That he
brightly and bravely lived through his captivity is much indeed to
his honour; but it was his point of honour to be bright and brave;
not at all to take care of his kingdom. A king who cared for that,
would have got thinner and sadder in prison.
And it remains true of the English squire to this day, that, for the
most part, he thinks that his kingdom is given him that he may be
bright and brave; and not at all that the sunshine or valour in him
is meant to be of use to his kingdom.
But the next point you have to note in Richard is indeed a very
noble quality, and true English; he always does as much of his work
as he can with his own hands. He was not in any wise a king who would
sit by a windmill to watch his son and his men at work, though brave
kings have done so. As much as might be, of whatever had to be done,
he would stedfastly do from his own shoulder; his main tool being an
old Greek one, and the working God Vulcan's--the clearing axe. When
that was no longer needful, and nothing would serve but spade and
trowel, still the king was foremost; and after the weary retreat to
Ascalon, when he found the place "so completely ruined and deserted,
that it afforded neither food, lodging, nor protection," nor any other
sort of capital,--forthwith, 20th January, 1192--his army and he set
to work to repair it; a three months' business, of incessant toil,
"from which the king himself was not exempted, but wrought with
greater ardour than any common labourer."
The next point of his character is very English also, but less
honourably so. I said but now that he had a great objection to anybody
whom he clearly comprehended to be a thief. But he had great difficulty
in reaching anything like an abstract definition of thieving, such
as would include every method of it, and every culprit, which is an
incapacity very common to many of us to this day. For instance, he
carried off a great deal of treasure which belonged to his father,
from Chinon (the royal treasury-town in France), and fortified
his own castles in Poitou with it; and when he wanted money to go
crusading with, sold the royal castles, manors, woods, and forests,
and even the superiority of the Crown of England over the kingdom of
Scotland, which his father had wrought hard for, for about a hundred
thousand pounds. Nay, the highest honours and most important offices
become venal under him; and from a Princess's dowry to a Saracen
caravan, nothing comes much amiss; not but that he gives generously
also; whole ships at a time when he is in the humour; but his main
practice is getting and spending, never saving; which covetousness is
at last the death of him. For hearing that a considerable treasure
of ancient coins and medals has been found in the lands of Vidomar,
Viscount of Limoges, King Richard sends forthwith to claim this waif
for himself. The Viscount offers him part only, presumably having
an antiquarian turn of mind. Whereupon Richard loses his temper,
and marches forthwith with some Brabant men, mercenaries, to besiege
the Viscount in his castle of Chalus; proposing, first, to possess
himself of the antique and otherwise interesting coin in the castle,
and then, on his general principle of objection to thieves, to hang the
garrison. The garrison, on this, offer to give up the antiquities if
they may march off themselves; but Richard declares that nothing will
serve but they must all be hanged. Whereon the siege proceeding by
rule. and Richard looking, as usual, into matters with his own eyes,
and going too near the walls, an arrow well meant, though half spent,
pierces the strong, white shoulder; the shield-bearing one, carelessly
forward above instead of under shield; or perhaps, rather, when he
was afoot, shieldless, engineering. He finishes his work, however,
though the scratch teases him; plans his assault, carries his castle,
and duly hangs his garrison, all but the archer, whom in his royal,
unreasoning way he thinks better of, for the well-spent arrow. But he
pulls it out impatiently, and the head of it stays in the fair flesh;
a little surgery follows; not so skilful as the archery of those days,
and the lion heart is appeased--
Sixth April, 1199.
We will pursue our historical studies, if you please, in that month
of the present year. But I wish, in the meantime, you would observe,
and meditate on, the quite Anglican character of Richard, to his death.
It might have been remarked to him, on his projecting the expedition to
Chalus, that there were not a few Roman coins, and other antiquities,
to be found in his own kingdom of England, without fighting for them,
but by mere spade labour and other innocuous means;--that even the
brightest new money was obtainable from his loyal people in almost any
quantity for civil asking; and that the same loyal people, encouraged
and protected, and above all, kept clean-handed, in the arts, by their
king, might produce treasures more covetable than any antiquities.
"No;" Richard would have answered,--"that is all hypothetical and
visionary; here is a pot of coin presently to be had--no doubt about
it--inside the walls here:--let me once get hold of that, and then,"--
That is what we English call being "Practical."
Believe me,
Faithfully yours,
JOHN RUSKIN.
FORS CLAVIGERA.
LETTER IV.
Denmark Hill,
1st April, 1871.
My Friends,
It cannot but be pleasing to us to reflect, this day, that if we
are often foolish enough to talk English without understanding it,
we are often wise enough to talk Latin without knowing it. For this
month retains its pretty Roman name, and means the month of Opening;
of the light in the days, and the life in the leaves, and of the
voices of birds, and of the hearts of men.
And being the month of Manifestation, it is pre-eminently the month
of Fools;--for under the beatific influences of moral sunshine,
or Education, the Fools always come out first.
But what is less pleasing to reflect upon, this spring morning, is,
that there are some kinds of education which may be described, not
as moral sunshine, but as moral moonshine; and that, under these,
Fools come out both First--and Last.
We have, it seems, now set our opening hearts much on this one point,
that we will have education for all men and women now, and for all
boys and girls that are to be. Nothing, indeed, can be more desirable,
if only we determine also what kind of education we are to have. It is
taken for granted that any education must be good;--that the more of
it we get, the better; that bad education only means little education;
and that the worst thing we have to fear is getting none. Alas, that
is not at all so. Getting no education is by no means the worst thing
that can happen to us. One of the pleasantest friends I ever had in
my life was a Savoyard guide, who could only read with difficulty,
and write scarcely intelligibly, and by great effort. He knew no
language but his own--no science, except as much practical agriculture
as served him to till his fields. But he was, without exception, one of
the happiest persons, and, on the whole, one of the best, I have ever
known: and after lunch, when he had had his half bottle of Savoy wine,
he would generally, as we walked up some quiet valley in the afternoon
light, give me a little lecture on philosophy; and after I had fatigued
and provoked him with less cheerful views of the world than his own,
he would fall back to my servant behind me, and console himself with
a shrug of the shoulders, and a whispered "Le pauvre enfant, il ne
sait pas vivre!"--("The poor child, he doesn't know how to live.")
No, my friends, believe me, it is not the going without education at
all that we have most to dread. The real thing to be feared is getting
a bad one. There are all sorts--good, and very good; bad, and very
bad. The children of rich people often get the worst education that
is to be had for money; the children of the poor often get the best
for nothing. And you have really these two things now to decide for
yourselves in England before you can take one quite safe practical
step in the matter, namely, first, what a good education is; and,
secondly, who is likely to give it you.
What it is? "Everybody knows that," I suppose you would most of you
answer. "Of course--to be taught to read, and write, and cast accounts;
and to learn geography, and geology, and astronomy, and chemistry,
and German, and French, and Italian, and Latin, and Greek and the
aboriginal Aryan language."
Well, when you had learned all that, what would you do next? "Next? Why
then we should be perfectly happy, and make as much money as ever
we liked, and we would turn out our toes before any company." I am
not sure myself, and I don't think you can be, of any one of these
three things. At least, as to making you very happy, I know something,
myself, of nearly all these matters--not much, but still quite as much
as most men, under the ordinary chances of life, with a fair education,
are likely to get together--and I assure you the knowledge does not
make me happy at all. When I was a boy I used to like seeing the sun
rise. I didn't know, then, there were any spots on the sun; now I do,
and am always frightened lest any more should come. When I was a boy,
I used to care about pretty stones. I got some Bristol diamonds at
Bristol, and some dog-tooth spar in Derbyshire; my whole collection
had cost, perhaps, three half-crowns, and was worth considerably
less; and I knew nothing whatever, rightly, about any single stone
in it;--could not even spell their names: but words cannot tell the
joy they used to give me. Now, I have a collection of minerals worth
perhaps from two to three thousand pounds; and I know more about some
of them than most other people. But I am not a whit happier, either for
my knowledge, or possessions, for other geologists dispute my theories,
to my grievous indignation and discontentment; and I am miserable about
all my best specimens, because there are better in the British Museum.
No, I assure you, knowledge by itself will not make you happy;
still less will it make you rich. Perhaps you thought I was writing
carelessly when I told you, last month, "science did not pay." But
you don't know what science is. You fancy it means mechanical art;
and so you have put a statue of Science on the Holborn Viaduct,
with a steam-engine regulator in its hands. My ingenious friends,
science has no more to do with making steam-engines than with making
breeches; though she condescends to help you a little in such necessary
(or it may be, conceivably, in both cases, sometimes unnecessary)
businesses. Science lives only in quiet places, and with odd people,
mostly poor. Mr. John Kepler, for instance, who is found by Sir Henry
Wotton "in the picturesque green country by the shores of the Donau,
in a little black tent in a field, convertible, like a windmill,
to all quarters, a camera-obscura, in fact. Mr. John invents rude
toys, writes almanacks, practises medicine, for good reasons, his
encouragement from the Holy Roman Empire and mankind being a pension
of 18l. a year, and that hardly ever paid." [8] That is what one gets
by star-gazing, my friends. And you cannot be simple enough, even in
April, to think I got my three thousand pounds'-worth of minerals by
studying mineralogy? Not so; they were earned for me by hard labour; my
father's in England, and many a sun-burnt vineyard-dresser's in Spain.
"What business had you, in your idleness, with their earnings
then?" you will perhaps ask. None, it may be; I will tell you in
a little while how you may find that out; it is not to the point
now. But it is to the point that you should observe I have not kept
their earnings, the portion of them, at least, with which I bought
minerals. That part of their earnings is all gone to feed the miners in
Cornwall, or on the Hartz mountains, and I have only got for myself a
few pieces of glittering (not always that, but often unseemly) stone,
which neither vine-dressers nor miners cared for; which you yourselves
would have to learn many hard words, much cramp mathematics, and
useless chemistry, in order to care for; which, if ever you did care
for, as I do, would most likely only make you envious of the British
Museum, and occasionally uncomfortable if any harm happened to your
dear stones. I have a piece of red oxide of copper, for instance,
which grieves me poignantly by losing its colour; and a crystal of
sulphide of lead, with a chip in it, which causes me a great deal of
concern--in April; because I see it then by the fresh sunshine.
My oxide of copper and sulphide of lead you will not then wisely
envy me. Neither, probably, would you covet a handful of hard brown
gravel, with a rough pebble in it, whitish, and about the size of
a pea; nor a few grains of apparently brass filings, with which the
gravel is mixed. I was but a fool to give good money for such things,
you think? It may well be. I gave thirty pounds for that handful
of gravel, and the miners who found it were ill-paid then; and it
is not clear to me that this produce of their labour was the best
possible. Shall we consider of it, with the help of the Cambridge
Catechism? at the tenth page of which you will find that Mr. Mill's
definition of productive labour is--"That which produces utilities
fixed and embodied in material objects."
This is very fine--indeed, superfine--English; but I can, perhaps,
make the meaning of the Greatest Thinker in England a little more
lucid for you by vulgarizing his terms.
"Object," you must always remember, is fine English for "Thing." It is
a semi-Latin word, and properly means a thing "thrown in your way;" so
that if you put "ion" to the end of it, it becomes Objection. We will
rather say "Thing," if you have no objection--you and I. A "Material"
thing, then, of course, signifies something solid and tangible. It is
very necessary for Political Economists always to insert this word
"material," lest people should suppose that there was any use or
value in Thought or Knowledge, and other such immaterial objects.
"Embodied" is a particularly elegant word; but superfluous, because you
know it would not be possible that a Utility should be disembodied,
as long as it was in a material object. But when you wish to express
yourself as thinking in a great manner, you may say--as, for instance,
when you are supping vegetable soup--that your power of doing so
conveniently and gracefully is "Embodied" in a spoon.
"Fixed" is, I am afraid, rashly, as well as superfluously, introduced
into his definition by Mr. Mill. It is conceivable that some Utilities
may be also volatile, or planetary, even when embodied. But at last
we come to the great word in the great definition--"Utility."
And this word, I am sorry to say, puzzles me most of all; for I never
myself saw a Utility, either out of the body, or in it, and should
be much embarrassed if ordered to produce one in either state.
But it is fortunate for us that all this seraphic language, reduced to
the vulgar tongue, will become, though fallen in dignity and reduced
in dimension, perfectly intelligible. The Greatest Thinker in England
means by these beautiful words to tell you that Productive labour
is labour that produces a Useful Thing. Which, indeed, perhaps,
you knew--or, without the assistance of great thinkers, might have
known, before now. But if Mr. Mill had said so much, simply, you might
have been tempted to ask farther--"What things are useful, and what
are not?" And as Mr. Mill does not know, nor any other Political
Economist going,--and as they therefore particularly wish nobody
to ask them,--it is convenient to say instead of "useful things,"
"utilities fixed and embodied in material objects," because that
sounds so very like complete and satisfactory information, that one
is ashamed, after getting it, to ask for any more.
But it is not, therefore, less discouraging that for the present I have
got no help towards discovering whether my handful of gravel with the
white pebble in it was worth my thirty pounds or not. I am afraid it
is not a useful thing to me. It lies at the back of a drawer, locked
up all the year round. I never look at it now, for I know all about
it: the only satisfaction I have for my money is knowing that nobody
else can look at it; and if nobody else wanted to, I shouldn't even
have that.
"What did you buy it for, then?" you will ask. Well, if you must
have the truth, because I was a Fool, and wanted it. Other people
have bought such things before me. The white stone is a diamond,
and the apparent brass filings are gold dust; but, I admit, nobody
ever yet wanted such things who was in his right senses. Only now,
as I have candidly answered all your questions, will you answer one
of mine? If I hadn't bought it, what would you have had me do with
my money? Keep that in the drawer instead?--or at my banker's, till
it grew out of thirty pounds into sixty and a hundred, in fulfilment
of the law respecting seed sown in good ground?
Doubtless, that would have been more meritorious for the time. But
when I had got the sixty or the hundred pounds--what should I have
done with them? The question only becomes doubly and trebly serious;
and all the more, to me, because when I told you last January that
I had bought a picture for a thousand pounds, permitting myself in
that folly for your advantage, as I thought, hearing that many of you
wanted art Patronage, and wished to live by painting,--one of your own
popular organs, the Liverpool Daily Courier, of February 9th, said, "it
showed want of taste,--of tact," and was "something like a mockery,"
to tell you so! I am not to buy pictures, therefore, it seems;--you
like to be kept in mines and tunnels, and occasionally blown hither and
thither, or crushed flat, rather than live by painting, in good light,
and with the chance of remaining all day in a whole and unextended
skin? But what shall I buy, then, with the next thirty pieces of gold
I can scrape together? Precious things have been bought, indeed, and
sold, before now for thirty pieces, even of silver, but with doubtful
issue. The over-charitable person who was bought to be killed at that
price, indeed, advised the giving of alms; but you won't have alms, I
suppose, you are so independent, nor go into almshouses--(and, truly,
I did not much wonder, as I walked by the old church of Abingdon, a
Sunday or two since, where the almshouses are set round the churchyard,
and under the level of it, and with a cheerful view of it, except
that the tombstones slightly block the light of the lattice-windows;
with beautiful texts from Scripture over the doors, to remind the
paupers still more emphatically that, highly blessed as they were,
they were yet mortal)--you won't go into almshouses; and all the
clergy in London have been shrieking against almsgiving to the lower
poor this whole winter long, till I am obliged, whenever I want to
give anybody a penny, to look up and down the street first, to see
if a clergyman's coming. Of course, I know I might buy as many iron
railings as I please, and be praised; but I've no room for them. I
can't well burn more coals than I do, because of the blacks, which
spoil my books; and the Americans won't let me buy any blacks alive,
or else I would have some black dwarfs with parrots, such as one sees
in the pictures of Paul Veronese. I should, of course, like myself,
above all things, to buy a pretty white girl, with a title--and I could
get great praise for doing that--only I haven't money enough. White
girls come dear, even when one buys them only like coals, for fuel. The
Duke of Bedford, indeed, bought Joan of Arc from the French, to burn,
for only ten thousand pounds, and a pension of three hundred a year to
the Bastard of Vendôme--and I could and would have given that for her,
and not burnt her; but one hasn't such a chance every day. Will you,
any of you, have the goodness--beggars, clergymen, workmen, seraphic
doctors, Mr. Mill, Mr. Fawcett, or the Politico-Economic Professor
of my own University--I challenge you, I beseech you, all and singly,
to tell me what I am to do with my money.