to give an account of the way they get their living; still less,
of how much they have got sewn up in their breeches. It does not,
however, matter much to a country that it should know how its poor
Vagabonds live; but it is of vital moment that it should know how
its rich Vagabonds live; and that much of knowledge, it seems to me,
in the present state of our education, is quite attainable. But that,
when you have attained it, you may act on it wisely, the first need
is that you should be sure you are living honestly yourselves. That
is why I told you, in my second letter, you must learn to obey good
laws before you seek to alter bad ones:--I will amplify now a little
the three promises I want you to make. Look back at them.
I. You are to do good work, whether you live or die. It may be you
will have to die;--well, men have died for their country often, yet
doing her no good; be ready to die for her in doing her assured good:
her, and all other countries with her. Mind your own business with your
absolute heart and soul; but see that it is a good business first. That
it is corn and sweet pease you are producing,--not gunpowder and
arsenic. And be sure of this, literally:--you must simply rather
die than make any destroying mechanism or compound. You are to be
literally employed in cultivating the ground, or making useful things,
and carrying them where they are wanted. Stand in the streets, and
say to all who pass by: Have you any vineyard we can work in,--not
Naboth's? In your powder and petroleum manufactory, we work no more.
I have said little to you yet of any of the pictures engraved--you
perhaps think, not to the ornament of my book.
Be it so. You will find them better than ornaments in time. Notice,
however, in the one I give you with this letter--the "Charity" of
Giotto--the Red Queen of Dante, and ours also,--how different his
thought of her is from the common one.
Usually she is nursing children, or giving money. Giotto thinks there
is little charity in nursing children;--bears and wolves do that for
their little ones; and less still in giving money.
His Charity tramples upon bags of gold--has no use for them. She gives
only corn and flowers; and God's angel given her, not even these--but
a Heart.
Giotto is quite literal in his meaning, as well as figurative. Your
love is to give food and flowers, and to labour for them only.
But what are we to do against powder and petroleum, then? What men
may do; not what poisonous beasts may. If a wretch spit in your face,
will you answer by spitting in his?--if he throw vitriol at you,
will you go to the apothecary for a bigger bottle?
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? We are so humane,
forsooth, and so wise; and our ancestors had tar-barrels for witches;
we will have them for everybody else, and drive the witches' trade
ourselves, by daylight; we will have our cauldrons, please Hecate,
cooled (according to the Darwinian theory,) with baboon's blood,
and enough of it, and sell hell-fire in the open street.
II. Seek to revenge no injury. You see now--do not you--a little more
clearly why I wrote that? what strain there is on the untaught masses
of you to revenge themselves, even with insane fire?
Alas, the Taught masses are strained enough also;--have you
not just seen a great religious and reformed nation, with
its goodly Captains,--philosophical, sentimental, domestic,
evangelical-angelical-minded altogether, and with its Lord's Prayer
really quite vital to it,--come and take its neighbour nation by the
throat, saying, "Pay me that thou owest"?
Seek to revenge no injury: I do not say, seek to punish no crime:
look what I hinted about failed bankers. Of that hereafter.
III. Learn to obey good laws; and in a little while you will reach
the better learning--how to obey good Men, who are living, breathing,
unblinded law; and to subdue base and disloyal ones, recognizing in
these the light, and ruling over those in the power, of the Lord of
Light and Peace, whose Dominion is an everlasting Dominion, and His
Kingdom from generation to generation.
Ever faithfully yours,
JOHN RUSKIN.
FORS CLAVIGERA.
LETTER VIII.
My Friends,
I begin this letter a month before it is wanted, [22] having several
matters in my mind that I would fain put into words at once. It is
the first of July, and I sit down to write by the dismallest light
that ever yet I wrote by; namely, the light of this midsummer morning,
in mid-England, (Matlock, Derbyshire), in the year 1871.
For the sky is covered with grey cloud;--not rain-cloud, but a dry
black veil, which no ray of sunshine can pierce; partly diffused in
mist, feeble mist, enough to make distant objects unintelligible,
yet without any substance, or wreathing, or colour of its own. And
everywhere the leaves of the trees are shaking fitfully, as they
do before a thunderstorm; only not violently, but enough to show the
passing to and fro of a strange, bitter, blighting wind. Dismal enough,
had it been the first morning of its kind that summer had sent. But
during all this spring, in London, and at Oxford, through meagre
March, through changelessly sullen April, through despondent May,
and darkened June, morning after morning has come grey-shrouded thus.
And it is a new thing to me, and a very dreadful one. I am fifty years
old, and more; and since I was five, have gleaned the best hours of
my life in the sun of spring and summer mornings; and I never saw
such as these, till now.
And the scientific men are busy as ants, examining the sun, and the
moon, and the seven stars, and can tell me all about them, I believe,
by this time; and how they move, and what they are made of.
And I do not care, for my part, two copper spangles how they move,
nor what they are made of. I can't move them any other way than they
go, nor make them of anything else, better than they are made. But I
would care much and give much, if I could be told where this bitter
wind comes from, and what it is made of.
For, perhaps, with forethought, and fine laboratory science, one
might make it of something else.
It looks partly as if it were made of poisonous smoke; very possibly
it may be: there are at least two hundred furnace chimneys in a square
of two miles on every side of me. But mere smoke would not blow to
and fro in that wild way. It looks more to me as if it were made of
dead men's souls--such of them as are not gone yet where they have
to go, and may be flitting hither and thither, doubting, themselves,
of the fittest place for them.
You know, if there are such things as souls, and if ever any of them
haunt places where they have been hurt, there must be many about us,
just now, displeased enough!
You may laugh, if you like. I don't believe any one of you would like
to live in a room with a murdered man in the cupboard, however well
preserved chemically;--even with a sunflower growing out at the top
of his head.
And I don't, myself, like living in a world with such a multitude of
murdered men in the ground of it--though we are making heliotropes
of them, and scientific flowers, that study the sun.
I wish the scientific men would let me and other people study it with
our own eyes, and neither through telescopes nor heliotropes. You
shall, at all events, study the rain a little, if not the sun, to-day,
and settle that question we have been upon so long as to where it
comes from.
All France, it seems, is in a state of enthusiastic delight and
pride at the unexpected facility with which she has got into debt;
and Monsieur Thiers is congratulated by all our wisest papers on his
beautiful statesmanship of borrowing. I don't myself see the cleverness
of it, having suffered a good deal from that kind of statesmanship in
private persons: but I daresay it is as clever as anything else that
statesmen do, now-a-days; only it happens to be more mischievous than
most of their other doings, and I want you to understand the bearings
of it.
Everybody in France who has got any money is eager to lend it to
M. Thiers at five per cent. No doubt; but who is to pay the five
per cent.? It is to be "raised" by duties on this and that. Then
certainly the persons who get the five per cent. will have to pay
some part of these duties themselves, on their own tea and sugar,
or whatever else is taxed; and this taxing will be on the whole of
their trade, and on whatever they buy with the rest of their fortunes;
[23] but the five per cent. only on what they lend M. Thiers.
It is a low estimate to say the payment of duties will take off one
per cent. of their five.
Practically, therefore, the arrangement is that they get four per
cent. for their money, and have all the trouble of customs duties,
to take from them another extra one per cent., and give it them
back again. Four per cent., however, is not to be despised. But who
pays that?
The people who have got no money to lend, pay it; the daily worker and
producer pays it. Unfortunate "William," who has borrowed, in this
instance, not a plane he could make planks with, but mitrailleuses
and gunpowder, with which he has planed away his own farmsteads,
and forests, and fair fields of corn, and having left himself
desolate, now has to pay for the loan of this useful instrument,
five per cent. So says the gently commercial James to him: "Not only
the price of your plane, but five per cent. to me for lending it,
O sweetest of Williams."
Sweet William, carrying generally more absinthe in his brains than wit,
has little to say for himself, having, indeed, wasted too much of his
sweetness lately, tainted disagreeably with petroleum, on the desert
air of Paris. And the people who are to get their five per cent. out
of him, and roll him and suck him,--the sugar-cane of a William that
he is,--how should they but think the arrangement a glorious one for
the nation?
So there is great acclaim and triumphal procession of financiers! and
the arrangement is made; namely, that all the poor labouring persons
in France are to pay the rich idle ones five per cent. annually,
on the sum of eighty millions of sterling pounds, until further notice.
But this is not all, observe. Sweet William is not altogether so soft
in his rind that you can crush him without some sufficient machinery:
you must have your army in good order, "to justify public confidence;"
and you must get the expense of that, beside your five per cent.,
out of ambrosial William. He must pay the cost of his own roller.
Now, therefore, see briefly what it all comes to.
First, you spend eighty millions of money in fireworks, doing no end
of damage in letting them off.
Then you borrow money, to pay the firework-maker's bill, from any
gain-loving persons who have got it.
And then, dressing your bailiff's men in new red coats and cocked
hats, you send them drumming and trumpeting into the fields, to take
the peasants by the throat, and make them pay the interest on what
you have borrowed; and the expense of the cocked hats besides.
That is "financiering," my friends, as the mob of the money-makers
understand it. And they understand it well. For that is what it
always comes to, finally; taking the peasant by the throat. He must
pay--for he only can. Food can only be got out of the ground, and all
these devices of soldiership, and law, and arithmetic, are but ways
of getting at last down to him, the furrow-driver, and snatching the
roots from him as he digs.
And they have got him down, now, they think, well, for a while, poor
William, after his fit of fury and petroleum: and can make their
money out of him for years to come, in the old ways.
Did you chance, my friends, any of you, to see, the other day,
the 83rd number of the Graphic, with the picture of the Queen's
concert in it? All the fine ladies sitting so trimly, and looking
so sweet, and doing the whole duty of woman--wearing their fine
clothes gracefully; and the pretty singer, white-throated, warbling
"Home, sweet home" to them, so morally, and melodiously! Here was
yet to be our ideal of virtuous life, thought the Graphic! Surely,
we are safe back with our virtues in satin slippers and lace
veils;--and our Kingdom of Heaven is come again, with observation,
and crown diamonds of the dazzlingest. Cherubim and Seraphim in
toilettes de Paris,--(blue-de-ciel--vert d'olivier-de-Noé--mauve de
colombe-fusillée,) dancing to Coote and Tinney's band; and vulgar
Hell reserved for the canaille, as heretofore! Vulgar Hell shall be
didactically pourtrayed, accordingly; (see page 17,)--Wickedness
going its way to its poor Home--bitter-sweet. Ouvrier and
petroleuse--prisoners at last--glaring wild on their way to die.
Alas! of these divided races, of whom one was appointed to teach and
guide the other, which has indeed sinned deepest--the unteaching,
or the untaught?--which now are guiltiest--these, who perish, or
those--who forget?
Ouvrier and petroleuse; they are gone their way--to their death. But
for these, the Virgin of France shall yet unfold the oriflamme above
their graves, and lay her blanches lilies on their smirched dust. Yes,
and for these, great Charles shall rouse his Roland, and bid him
put ghostly trump to lip, and breathe a point of war; and the helmed
Pucelle shall answer with a wood-note of Domrémy;--yes, and for these
the Louis they mocked, like his master, shall raise his holy hands,
and pray God's peace.
"Not as the world giveth." Everlasting shame only, and unrest, are the
world's gifts. These Swine of the five per cent. shall share them duly.
La sconoscente vita, che i fe' sozzi
Ad ogni conoscenza or li fa bruni. [24]
Che tutto l'oro, ch'e sotto la luna,
E che già fù, di queste anime stanche
Non poterebbe farne posar una. [25]
"Ad ogni conoscenza bruni:" Dark to all recognition! So they would have
it indeed, true of instinct. "Ce serait l'inquisition," screamed the
Senate of France, threatened with income-tax and inquiry into their
ways and means. Well,--what better thing could it be? Had they not
been blind long enough, under their mole-hillocks, that they should
shriek at the first spark of "Inquisition"? A few things might be
"inquired," one should think, and answered, among honest men, now, to
advantage, and openly? "Ah no--for God's sake," shrieks the Senate,
"no Inquisition. If ever anybody should come to know how we live,
we were disgraced for ever, honest gentlemen that we are."
Now, my friends, the first condition of all bravery is to keep out
of this loathsomeness. If you do live by rapine, stand up like a man
for the old law of bow and spear; but don't fall whimpering down on
your belly, like Autolycus, "grovelling on the ground," when another
human creature asks you how you get your daily bread, with an "Oh,
that ever I was born,--here is inquisition come on me!"
The Inquisition must come. Into men's consciences, no; not now: there
is little worth looking into there. But into their pockets--yes;
a most practicable and beneficial inquisition, to be made thoroughly
and purgatorially, once for all, and rendered unnecessary hereafter,
by furnishing the relieved marsupialia with--glass pockets, for
the future.
You know, at least, that we, in our own society, are to have glass
pockets, as we are all to give the tenth of what we have, to buy
land with, so that we must every one know each other's property to a
farthing. And this month I begin making up my own accounts for you,
as I said I would: I could not, sooner, though I set matters in train
as soon as my first letter was out, and effected (as I supposed!),
in February, a sale of 14,000l. worth of houses, at the West End,
to Messrs. ---- and ----, of ---- Row.
But from then till now, I've been trying to get that piece of business
settled, and until yesterday, 19th July, I have not been able.
For, first there was a mistake made by my lawyer in the list of
the houses: No. 7 ought to have been No. 1. It was a sheer piece of
stupidity, and ought to have been corrected by a dash of the pen;
but all sorts of deeds had to be made out again, merely that they
might be paid for; and it took about three months to change 7 into 1.
At last all was declared smooth again, and I thought I should get my
money; but Messrs. ---- never stirred. My people kept sending them
letters, saying I really did want the money, though they mightn't
think it. Whether they thought it or not, they took no notice of any
such informal communications. I thought they were going to back out
of their bargain; but my man of business at last got their guarantee
for its completion.
"If they've guaranteed the payment, why don't they pay?" thought
I; but still I couldn't get any money. At last I found the lawyers
on both sides were quarrelling over the stamp-duties! Nobody knew,
of the whole pack of them, whether this stamp or that was the right
one! and my lawyers wouldn't give an eighty-pound stamp, and theirs
wouldn't be content with a twenty-pound one.
Now, you know, all this stamp business itself is merely Mr. Gladstone's
[26] way of coming in for his share of the booty. I can't be allowed
to sell my houses in peace, but Mr. Gladstone must have his three
hundred pounds out of me, to feed his Woolwich infant with, and fire
it off "with the most satisfactory result," "nothing damaged but
the platform."
I am content, if only he would come and say what he wants, and take it,
and get out of my sight. But not to know what he does want! and to
keep me from getting my money at all, while his lawyers are asking
which is the right stamp? I think he had better be clear on that
point next time.
But here, at last, are six months come and gone, and the stamp question
is--not settled, indeed, but I've undertaken to keep my man of business
free of harm, if the stamps won't do; and so at last he says I'm to
have my money; and I really believe, by the time this letter is out,
Messrs. ---- will have paid me my 14,000l.
Now you know I promised you the tenth of all I had, when free
from incumbrances already existing on it. This first instalment
of 14,000l. is not all clear, for I want part of it to found a
Mastership of Drawing under the Art Professorship at Oxford; which I
can't do rightly for less than 5,000l. But I'll count the sum left as
10,000l. instead of 9,000l., and that will be clear for our society,
and so, you shall have a thousand pounds down, as the tenth of that,
which will quit me, observe, of my pledge thus far.
A thousand down, I say; but down where? Where can I put it to be
safe for us? You will find presently, as others come in to help us,
and we get something worth taking care of, that it becomes a very
curious question indeed, where we can put our money to be safe!
In the meantime, I've told my man of business to buy 1,000l. consols
in the names of two men of honour; the names cannot yet be
certain. What remains of the round thousand shall be kept to add
to next instalment. And thus begins the fund, which I think we may
advisably call the "St. George's" fund. And although the interest on
consols is, as I told you before, only the taxation on the British
peasant continued since the Napoleon wars, still this little portion
of his labour, the interest on our St. George's fund, will at last
be saved for him, and brought back to him.
And now, if you will read over once again the end of my fifth letter,
I will tell you a little more of what we are to do with this money,
as it increases.
First, let whoever gives us any, be clear in their minds that it is
a Gift. It is not an Investment. It is a frank and simple gift to
the British people: nothing of it is to come back to the giver.
But also, nothing of it is to be lost. The money is not to be spent in
feeding Woolwich infants with gunpowder. It is to be spent in dressing
the earth and keeping it,--in feeding human lips,--in clothing human
bodies,--in kindling human souls.
First of all, I say, in dressing the earth. As soon as the fund
reaches any sufficient amount, the Trustees shall buy with it any
kind of land offered them at just price in Britain. Rock, moor,
marsh, or sea-shore--it matters not what, so it be British ground,
and secured to us.
Then, we will ascertain the absolute best that can be made of every
acre. We will first examine what flowers and herbs it naturally
bears; every wholesome flower that it will grow shall be sown in
its wild places, and every kind of fruit-tree that can prosper;
and arable and pasture land extended by every expedient of tillage,
with humble and simple cottage dwellings under faultless sanitary
regulation. Whatever piece of land we begin to work upon, we shall
treat thoroughly at once, putting unlimited manual labour on it, until
we have every foot of it under as strict care as a flower-garden:
and the labourers shall be paid sufficient, unchanging wages; and
their children educated compulsorily in agricultural schools inland,
and naval schools by the sea, the indispensable first condition of
such education being that the boys learn either to ride or to sail;
the girls to spin, weave, and sew, and at a proper age to cook all
ordinary food exquisitely; the youth of both sexes to be disciplined
daily in the strictest practice of vocal music; and for morality,
to be taught gentleness to all brute creatures,--finished courtesy
to each other,--to speak truth with rigid care, and to obey orders
with the precision of slaves. Then, as they get older, they are to
learn the natural history of the place they live in,--to know Latin,
boys and girls both,--and the history of five cities: Athens, Rome,
Venice, Florence, and London.
Now, as I told you in my fifth letter, to what extent I may be able to
carry this plan into execution, I know not; but to some visible extent,
with my own single hand, I can and will, if I live. Nor do I doubt
but that I shall find help enough, as soon as the full action of the
system is seen, and ever so little a space of rightly cultivated ground
in perfect beauty, with inhabitants in peace of heart, of whom none
Doluit miserans inopem, aut invidit habenti.
Such a life we have lately been taught by vile persons to think
impossible; so far from being impossible, it has been the actual life
of all glorious human states in their origin.
Hanc olim veteres vitam coluere Sabini;
Hanc Remus et frater; sic fortis Etruria crevit;
Scilicet et rerum facta est pulcherrima Roma.
But, had it never been endeavoured until now, we might yet learn to
hope for its unimagined good by considering what it has been possible
for us to reach of unimagined evil. Utopia and its benediction are
probable and simple things, compared to the Kakotopia and its curse,
which we had seen actually fulfilled. We have seen the city of Paris
(what miracle can be thought of beyond this?) with her own forts
raining ruin on her palaces, and her young children casting fire
into the streets in which they had been born, but we have not faith
enough in heaven to imagine the reverse of this, or the building
of any city whose streets shall be full of innocent boys and girls
playing in the midst thereof.
My friends, you have trusted, in your time, too many idle words. Read
now these following, not idle ones; and remember them; and trust them,
for they are true:--
"Oh, thou afflicted, tossed with tempest, and not comforted, behold,
I will lay thy stones with fair colours, and lay thy foundations
with sapphires.
"And all thy children shall be taught of the Lord; and great shall
be the peace of thy children.
"In righteousness shalt thou be established: thou shalt be far from
oppression; for thou shalt not fear: and from terror; for it shall
not come near thee....
"Whosoever shall gather together against thee shall fall for thy
sake....
"No weapon that is formed against thee shall prosper; and every tongue
that shall rise against thee in judgment thou shalt condemn. This is
the heritage of the servants of the Lord; and their righteousness is
of me, saith the Lord."
Remember only that in this now antiquated translation, "righteousness"
means, accurately and simply, "justice," and is the eternal law of
right, obeyed alike in the great times of each state, by Jew, Greek,
and Roman. In my next letter, we will examine into the nature of this
justice, and of its relation to Governments that deserve the name.
And so believe me
Faithfully yours,
JOHN RUSKIN.
FORS CLAVIGERA.
LETTER IX.
Denmark Hill,
1st September, 1871.
My Friends,