clerical claims, is the very heart of Quaker practice; and the _raison
d’être_ of their separate meetings. The Priesthood of all Believers is
at the heart of their official statements, and the implication in their
ministry. They say that there should be no laity among them, exactly as
Ruskin does. They decline all forms of fixed or routine prayer, and
never practise them. Their meeting houses are plain, and their worship
is ascetically devoid of sensuous attraction in glowing glass or carven
stone or in the odour of incense.
It is one of their central historical testimonies, dating from the
seventeenth century, that the Bible should not be called the Word of
God. For this they were called atheists by the clergy of Charles II. The
controversies of that time rarely avoided touching on this sore point.
For them, as for Ruskin, the seat of authority is The Light Within, and,
like Ruskin, they are willing to “give up Moses” if history demands it.
The attitude of Ruskin to Baptism and the Lord’s Supper is a thoroughly
Quaker one. Both hold that they are unnecessary and have no “Validity.”
The only “Church” they recognize is the Universal Church composed of all
faithful men everywhere; and as Ruskin speaks of sheep on distant
mountains who look like stones, so Friends have always held that the
heathen were or could be saints of the household of God, and that
knowledge of the historical Jesus Christ was not essential to salvation
here or hereafter.
There is a remarkable omission too. So far as I know Ruskin never speaks
of Hell, as an article of faith. Nor does it ever occur in Quaker
ministry.
It is almost uncanny that there is an agreement also on minor
testimonies which might appear accidental. Friends do not approve of
mourning garments, though there is in this generation some weakness
about this. Ruskin thinks that “the people who really believe in
immortality must be few, else why the Church’s singular habit of putting
on mourning for every one summoned to be with Christ, which is far
better.”[45]
It is well known that Friends refuse to take judicial Oaths, and gave a
handle thereby to hostile magistrates, when other handles slipped away.
Ruskin says plainly that Oaths are “disobedience to the teaching of
Christ.”[46]
I believe we have now mentioned all the points of Quakerism, except the
testimony against all War. From Chapter VIII devoted to this, it is
clear that Ruskin was generally, but not always, on Quaker lines. He
wobbled somewhat, and felt puzzled, and I am afraid that a certain
number of Friends have done the same at times of crisis.
Lastly, the Quaker simplicity of life, the avoidance of luxury and
social pretensions, the fixing of attention chiefly on the things of
the spirit, are Ruskin’s dearest delight, the subject of his most
earnest pleas. Take one:
“The uses, and the desire, of seclusion, of meditation, of restraint,
and of correction, are they not passing from us in the collision of
worldly interests, and restless contests of mean hope and meaner fear?
The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear?”[47]
For a man who, in the name and for the sake of spiritual things, fought
the good fight of a reformer during two generations, Ruskin was but
little brought into personal friendship with members of the Society of
Friends. George Baker, of Bewdley, who was one of the early donors to
the St. George’s Guild and was long one of its Trustees, and afterwards
its Master, is the principal personal link he had with the Society.
Henry Swan, formerly his curator at the Sheffield Museum, was a Friend.
When the writer, as one of a party of Friends, was kindly shown over
Brantwood by its owner in 1884, the only things he had to say to us
about Quakerism in the course of a forty minutes’ talk, were a little
homily on sectarianism, contrasted with a church of “God-fearing
people,” including Catholics and Turks--a little chaff about our
failing in the matter of usury to literally obey our Bibles, as he
supposed we thought we always tried to do--and an astonishing
pronouncement that “Your early Friends would have carried all before
them, if they had not opposed that which is obeyed by the whole of the
animal creation--the love of colour.” We must take this as one of the
characteristic plunges into emphasis (some well-balanced people would
use a stronger term perhaps), which are a cause at once of his strength
as a stimulating teacher, and of his insufficiency as an infallible
oracle, to be mechanically interpreted.
These three utterances, however, slight as they are, show a misreading
of Quakerism. We are, I trust, the least sectional of little sects. The
religion of the Light Within is at the basis of all other religions too;
it is the absolute religion, religion reduced to its simplest, and it
brings us into sympathetic connection with Evangelical, Ritualist, Jew,
Mohammedan and “heathen,” so far as these have the Divine Spirit shining
through their particular forms of thought and practice. Also, of all
people, we are the least prone to unintelligent Biblical literalism, and
are quite unlikely to be stumbled by the Mosaic regulations about
usury. There is a measure of truth in his third statement about
“colour,” if by that he meant, in a comprehensive sense, those
recreations which relieve the strain of a severely ruled life. We have
become less numerous, I doubt not, through our restrictions (now
abandoned) on art, music, “the theatre and the ball-room.” But there
have been compensations to those who have stayed under the discipline.
Ruskin, then, never understood the Society of Friends in the outward.
This was the mere result of circumstances. Brought up in the south of
London, educated at Oxford, living much abroad, with local interests and
acquaintances chiefly centering round Denmark Hill, Oxford and Coniston,
he had no great opportunity to meet Friends.
He never had any Quaker teaching in his youth. The voice of the Society
of Friends was too faint to reach him. He never found his way across the
hill from Brantwood to the ancient meeting house at Hawkshead, but his
word has penetrated further than ours, and all unaware he has done our
work.
How marvellous is this series of harmonies, unintended, unrecognized on
both sides, between him and the Society of Friends! It looks as though
Quakerism is not an arbitrary group of doctrines gathered up, as he
fancied them, by George Fox, but a coherent system, all whose parts hang
together as they all appear together when they rise up in Ruskin. It is
a strong confirmation of the coherence and validity of the religious
discoveries of our Quaker forefathers in the seventeenth century, when
we find that they are repeated in the research of another emancipated
but devout thinker, a religious rationalist who was an expert in the
things of the soul.
_CHAPTER IV_
_RUSKIN AND MILL_
A RECONCILIATION
The controversy between Ruskin and the orthodox Political Economists of
his time was central in his career, and has occupied a prominent place
in the thought of the last sixty years. Either Ruskin’s teaching or that
of Mill and his colleagues, or that of both, has been clouded with
uncertainty and so has lost force. If it should be found, as I shall try
to show, that there was no real ground for the controversy at all--that
it was all due to misapprehension, to mere ambiguity in a term, it will
reinforce the conclusions of the economists in their modern revised
form, add cogency to the teaching of Ruskin, and clear away storm clouds
which have done great harm. The mistake arose through a wrong conception
by Ruskin of the scope of Economics--of what its teachers were after.
Political Economy has always been treated by careful writers as the
science of human action with regard to the acquisition and use of
property. This is a pure science. It is a branch of applied psychology.
It measures motives, and analyses the action of buyers and sellers with
a view to finding out what men in business will normally do, and how
values of land, labour, capital and commodities are determined. This
does not open any question of right or wrong, any question of oppression
or starvation, of luxury, vanity or pride. This is as cold-blooded, as
purely intellectual and critical an inquiry as the study and measurement
of electrical currents; what produces them, conducts them, wastes or
scatters them. An electrician will show how a telephone may be made, he
will invent it, and he will explain it; but it is no business of his to
ask whether courtesy and good feeling or profanity and fraud will
characterize the messages which will go over his instrument. That is not
his business as a scientist, though the use of his own telephone is his
business as a man.
Now this is a perfectly intelligible, it may be a perfectly blameless,
and, at first sight, a probably useful branch of inquiry. It separates
off from the great mass of human actions a definite field; it omits the
motive of religion, the motive of love, and the motive of self-denying
service, outside service for the family for whom the man under
discussion is economically responsible.
Concerning it, we must ask three questions:
1. Is this separation practicable, and in consequence are the results
true or approximately true?
2. Under what limitations is it useful to make such a separation, and
what real guidance to conduct, if any, follows?
3. Afterwards we will inquire to what extent the political economists
have rigidly confined themselves to theory, and having found that they
did not, when they went over into practical advice we will ask whether
they were deluded by the results they had reached within their limits,
and whether they hastily assumed that they had found a more complete
guide to human action than they had.
Is then the separation of dealings which can be expressed in terms of
money from the other dealings of life sufficiently possible to make a
science of those dealings? Are they predictable, given the
circumstances? Will like causes produce like results? Is the motive
measured by money sufficiently separable from other motives, to be
treated by itself?
We must at once admit that such separation cannot be absolute; that
affection, pity, charity, habit, ignorance, legislative restriction,
public spirit, prevent the individual from always acting according to
his economic interests. He does not always buy in the cheapest shop; he
grumbles but helps a struggling neighbour by his custom, and puts up for
some time with an inferior article. He goes on using old machinery for
want of knowledge or of a progressive mind. He keeps on an old hand for
the sake of the past. Still, in the long run, these qualifications to
the general law do not survive. In general, men in the large may be
trusted to do that which it is their economic interest to do, within
such lines of honesty as are ratified by law, or of honour as are
regarded by public opinion. Competition, that is, is the general rule in
business; and we shall not go far wrong in assuming it as the method in
vogue in Europe and America, unless some special feature of monopoly or
legislative Protection or trade combination supersedes it.
This is not the same as saying that it is always right to follow the
lines of pure competition. We must at all points check the tendency to
pass from the indicative to the imperative mood, from a science to an
art; from what will raise our profits to what is our duty in our
business.
So we assert that there is a Theory of Value, and that it is an
approximately verified theory under the present system of business.
Further, that in 1860, when business was less regulated than it is now,
the results were so much nearer verification by experience.
That business is carried on for self-interest on the whole, seems to me
a safe approximation to reality--and that the exceptions to it are not
chemically explosive of its system as Ruskin says, but can be added to
the enquiry afterwards, like friction or the resistance of the air in
mechanics.
Whether this is desirable, or the last word of human organization, is
quite another question; and the questions are better kept separate.
Moral considerations are too important to come in as an incidental
qualification to business motives. They should be the dominating
influence, and it is better that economic results should not obtain a
sort of sanction as being tinctured with righteousness, when only a few
drops of the tincture have been administered. It is better that
Economics should keep their place as a science of observed facts.
At the present moment when war is being diagnosed as the worst disease
of society, there are many voices to point out its origin in economic
greed, and through rivalry in the exploitation of backward peoples.
Military pomp and pride, the mere ambition of Emperors and Generals,
must bear their share of the blame, but greed and oppression are the
tap-root of war, and Ruskin, it happens, was foremost in saying so, as
is pointed out in a later chapter.
The economic motive is behind many actions where it is not avowed. Since
the elementary need of man is, and always has been, to make a living,
and he tries to make it as pleasantly as possible, this must be so, and
the laws which govern production, distribution and exchange are of prime
importance for men in communities.
When Ruskin touched on an economic law, on a doctrine of the science
which he thus erroneously blasphemed, he was remarkably correct; he was
an orthodox follower after all of much of the doctrine of Mill. He was
“an utterly fearless and unscrupulous free trader.”[48] His instinct,
the moral sanction to which he always looked--as Mill also did--as a
guide to practice, told him that protection was a wicked action,
forbidding to workers in other countries their right to earn their
living in the way by which they could produce the most. “I mean by
co-operation, not only fellowship between trading firms, but between
trading nations; so that it shall no more be thought (as it is now, with
ludicrous and vain selfishness) an advantage for one nation to undersell
another, and take its occupation away from it; but that the primal and
eternal law of commerce shall be of all men understood--viz., that every
nation is fitted by its character and the nature of its territories for
some particular employments and manufactures, and that it is the true
interest of every other nation to encourage it in such speciality.”[49]
“I do not admit even the idea of reciprocity. Let other nations, if they
like, keep their ports shut; every wise nation will throw its own
open.”[50] He knew every point of the correct economic theory of free
trade. He realized foreign commerce as exchange or barter, with the
dependence of exports upon imports. This dependence, showing the true
nature of International Trade, follows from the correct doctrine of
currency. Ruskin emphasized this doctrine repeatedly. He knew that
every fall in the supply of commodities made the gold currency of less
value. He knew that inflation by paper money similarly sent prices up.
He was enthusiastic for a gold standard, not as being perfect, but being
the best available.[51] Mill’s still valuable chapter on International
Trade and all current economic doctrine on currency are Ruskinian
economy too. Also, when a disciple of the much depreciated Manchester
School talked of _laisser faire_ he generally meant: “Let Protection
alone.” His phrase was general, but in the days of Gladstone’s
chancellorships of the exchequer, the “Manchester” man was thinking
mainly of the removal of tariffs. It would not be in accord with human
psychology if the principle had not been pushed too far, and by friends
and opponents alike the principle of governmental abstention from
interference enlarged, and made universal. In calling for government
action to determine wages and organize employment, Ruskin was simply
uttering a need not yet felt. He was a twentieth century voice, heard
too soon.
But we must always avoid the snare into which the earlier economists
fell, of assuming that their conclusions were rigid and absolutely
correct. There can be no mechanical infallibility about Economics; it is
not accurate enough to be mathematically true. It expresses tendencies.
In a word, it is a psychological, not a physical science. Its subject is
not wealth, simply, but human motive in regard to wealth.
Students of the Political Economy of Adam Smith, Ricardo, Bentham and
James Mill, find that these great founders of economic science, in whose
debt we shall ever remain, assumed too much mechanical uniformity in
men’s actions, and did not give enough weight to the reaction of man
upon his circumstances. They counted a man too much as a passively
responsive machine. This is what led them to the doctrines since so
seriously modified--the existence of a fixed Wages Fund, the “Iron Law
of Wages,” the thesis that “A demand for Commodities is not a demand for
Labour.”
John Stuart Mill began life under these influences, and his _Principles
of Political Economy_ contain them; but in later life he abandoned his
Wages Fund theory, gave greater weight to the human side, the variable
and uncertain factor in economic problems, and under the influence of
Comte and of the Socialists doubted the accuracy of much of his economic
argument. This change was published in his review of the work of his
friend Thornton, who had attacked the Wages Fund theory in 1869. It is
in Mill’s collected Essays.
The Political Economy which Ruskin attacked was that of Mill’s
_Principles_; and to judge fairly of the controversy we must treat the
science, not as it was left, in high universal abstraction, by Ricardo;
nor as worked up with rich historical material, cautious and well
informed, as in Professor Marshall’s writings, but (between these) as
Mill left it in his first edition of 1848.
In estimating the extent to which Ruskin’s attack was excusable, we need
to know whether Mill overstepped the bounds of theory, of pure
science--and became a political adviser and exhorter. This he certainly
did, quite often in his book, and he says in his preface that it was
part of his purpose to do so.
Ruskin says that it is when he is thus inconsistent with his own theory,
and strays into practical teaching, that he begins to take any interest
in him; and certainly Mill gave, precisely because he was a
philanthropist and a social reformer, room for a critic to come in and
say: “Lo, you pretend to be a practical guide to conduct, and you are
only taking account of low and selfish motives; you are an unworthy
exponent of human nature, if we are to regard you as taking it all for
your province.” The chapters chiefly referred to here are those on “The
Advantages of a Stationary State,” and on “The Futurity of the Labouring
Classes.”
Ruskin recognizes and admits this in a clever but naughty way:
“I should have regretted the need of pointing out inconsistency in any
portion of Mr. Mill’s work, had not the value of his work proceeded from
its inconsistencies. He deserves honour among economists by
inadvertently disclaiming the principles which he states, and tacitly
introducing the moral considerations with which he claims his science
has no connection. Many of his chapters are therefore true and valuable;
and the only conclusions of his which I have to dispute are those which
follow from his premises.”[52] Mill made the distinction between science
and social reform quite plain in his chapters, and left no room for
confusion. Ruskin must have thoroughly understood this.
Full in the face of this theoretical investigation comes Ruskin’s
definition of Political Economy, with which he begins _Munera Pulveris_:
“Political Economy is neither an art nor science, but a system of
conduct and legislature, founded on the sciences, directing the arts,
and impossible, except under certain conditions of moral culture.”
Here we have an entirely different object. This Economy aims at telling
us what we ought to do for the enriching and purifying of life upon the
earth, and what the state ought to do for the same end. This is
universal politics and social amelioration: frankly and definitely, not
a science at all.
There need be no conflict between this comprehensive study of political
ethics, including religion, art, and education among its principal
departments--and that science which might usefully come in as one of
those on which it is based. To be sure, both claim to be called
Political Economy; but that is only a verbal rivalry. As to that,
Ruskin’s Political Economy has by derivation the proper right to the
term--the State’s Housekeeping. But it is not always wise to follow
derivations; the scholastic Economy was in possession of the word,
though properly speaking it was not ὁικονομἱα nor was it πολῑτῐκή.
Ruskin’s weakness for playing with etymologies, often curious ones,
helped to maintain this rivalry in words.
There is room for both studies, the scholastic economies and the
Ruskinian economy. That is my thesis.
How differently the criticism of Carlyle and Ruskin might have been
launched. Ruskin might have said that he admitted that in business
people must be assumed to follow their own interests, that is, that the
“economic man” would stand as a general average in business relations.
But he might have said, after that, every word that he wanted to say,
about the insufficiency of this principle as a guide to conduct. He
might have dwelt on the strength of loyalties and affections, and on the
powerful economic value of good relations between masters and servants.
He might have shown how misleading were economic results if acted on as
a complete handbook of conduct even in business. He might have written
_Unto This Last_ with an introduction by John Stuart Mill, and
everything positive or constructive left in it. The satire and
sword-play might have been used for something else.