everyone has a notion sufficiently correct for common purposes, of what
is meant by wealth. This is not his definition; he reaches that later:
it is a reasonable introductory remark. But Ruskin assumes that this is
his definition, and assails him for his lack of scientific precision and
his looseness of thought, as though an astronomer were to begin by
saying that everyone has a notion, sufficient for common purposes, of
what is meant by a star. The criticism is the more unreasonable, when we
find the critic himself doing the very same thing in his famous chapter
on “The Nature of Gothic” in _The Stones of Venice_, in which, at the
opening, the remark occurs: “We all have some notion, most of us a very
determined one, of the meaning of the term Gothic.” Ruskin goes on to
play with the etymology of value;[62] from _valor_ and _valere_, meaning
that which avails towards life and health; and says true wealth is what
tends to life and the increase of its powers, not pearls nor topaz, but
air and light and cleanliness. “To be wealthy is to have a large stock
of useful articles,” say the economists. What, he asks, is to
“have"--has the embalmed body of Carlo Borromeo the golden crosier and
the cross of emeralds on its breast? Has a gold-filled belt the man whom
it drowns, or has he it? Does not “having” depend on the vital power to
use? What, nextly, is “useful”? Persons called wealthy may be inherently
incapable of wealth, mere reservoirs in the stream of national produce,
if not impediments in its course, and so causing “illth” rather than
“wealth.” Therefore the aim and end of Political Economy is to develop
moral character and capacity for valiantly using valuables, and the
great difficulty is that manly character is apt to suffer from
possessing material wealth and also apt to cast it away. Wealth of
character and wealth of goods tend to undermine one another.
“In a community regulated by laws of supply and demand but protected
from open violence, the persons who become rich are, generally speaking,
industrious, resolute, proud, covetous, prompt, methodical, sensible,
unimaginative, insensitive and ignorant. The persons who remain poor are
the entirely foolish, the entirely wise, the idle, the reckless, the
humble, the thoughtful, the dull, the imaginative, the sensitive, the
well-informed, the improvident, the irregularly and impulsively wicked,
the clumsy knave, the open thief, and the entirely merciful, just and
godly person.”[63]
With one further piece of Ruskin’s teaching on the nature of wealth, I
think that the subject will be clear.
“‘Rich’ is a relative word implying its opposite ‘poor’ as positively as
the word ‘north’ implies its opposite ‘south.’ Men nearly always speak
and write as if riches were absolute, and it were possible by following
certain scientific precepts (Ruskin’s capital error turns up here), for
everybody to be rich. Whereas riches are a power like that of
electricity, acting only through inequalities or negations of itself.
The force of the guinea you have in your pocket depends wholly on the
default of a guinea in your neighbour’s pocket. If he did not want it,
it would be of no use to you; the degree of power it possesses depends
accurately upon the need or desire he has for it--and the art of making
yourself rich, in the ordinary mercantile economist’s sense, is
therefore equally and necessarily the art of keeping your neighbour
poor.”[64]
This is all true; if by rich we understand, as the use of the word in
common practice warrants, relatively wealthy. The possession of money is
the possession of an order upon labour; and it is of no use if there is
no available labour needing it. Ruskin’s illustration is that of a large
landed proprietor who could get no servants to feed his cattle, mine
his gold, plough his corn lands, because no one was in want of his
wages. He must lead a life of severe and common labour to produce even
ordinary comforts, and live in the midst of a waste desert. Therefore,
what is meant by making oneself rich is to produce the maximum
inequality between ourselves and our neighbours.[65]
Ruskin is grievously unfair in saying that that is the object of
mercantile (political) economy; that it is “the science of getting
rich.” Such a statement libels both the science and its expounders; and
it contains, for Ruskin, an extraordinary looseness in the use of words.
There cannot be a science of getting rich, that is an art or a craft.
Science is organized knowledge, not practical faculty to do anything or
get anything.[66]
How wide is the range of Ruskin’s Economy, how practical its objects,
how little of a science it is, how entirely an art, the art of practical
government and production, will be further clear from this statement:
“Political economy (the economy of a State or of citizens), consists
simply in the production, preservation and distribution, at fittest time
and place, of useful or pleasurable things. The farmer who cuts his hay
at the right time, the shipwright who drives his bolts well home in
sound wood, the builder who lays good bricks in well tempered mortar,
the housewife who takes care of her furniture in the parlour and guards
against all waste in her kitchen, and the singer who rightly disciplines
and never overstrains his voice, are all political economists in the
true and final sense; adding continually to the riches and well-being of
the nation to which they belong.”[67]
All this is quite true; but not in any sense a rival study to scholastic
Economics. The great misfortune is that the atmosphere of controversy
and revolt runs through all this glorious gospel, so strong and true in
its teachings, so perverse in its criticisms. The sum of the whole
doctrine is put in memorable words near the close of _Unto This Last_:
“There is no wealth but life. Life, including all its powers of love, of
joy and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the
greatest number of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest
who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has
also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his
possessions, over the lives of others.”[68]
All railing accusation is out of place. The business of the man whom
Ruskin calls the “vulgar economist” is to theorize, his is to edify. The
one is the theoretical engineer and surveyor for the house of the state;
his part in the ὁικονομἱα is that of a professional consultant.
Ruskin is the actual builder; round his guidance sound the clang of
hammer and anvil, the actual stonemasons’ and plumbers’ tools; under his
eye grow in time the ivy and the flowers; but it is not the business of
the architect or surveyor or sanitary engineer to know all about these,
still less to keep a supply of them in his office.
The vastness of the task Ruskin had undertaken is now plain to us and
was pathetic for him. _Munera Pulveris_ contains the definitions of the
new science. No more of it has ever appeared in systematic scientific
form. It is touching to find the inspired artist reformer stopped again
and again in his great attempt to write a complete guide to public
action, by some subject needing special research. “I will treat of this
when I come to” coinage or education, or whatever it might be; ever
promising, ever hoping, if so be by a _tour de force_ of genius he might
storm the city of Mansoul; whereas, it needed all the corps of economic
researchers, mining here and there into truth, making a breach here and
there into the wall of the unknown, working on Parliamentary Returns and
tables of statistics, on records of public registrars and clearing house
reports, by patient inquiry to achieve a little at a time. Ruskin wrote
for thirty years after the epoch-making date of 1860; and it is even now
our task to systematize, if we can, his scattered contributions to
practical Economy.
We may be glad, in John Ruskin’s case, as in that of lesser prophets,
that the greatness of men is measured, not like chains, by their weakest
link, but rather like tides, by the highest they reach.
_CHAPTER V_
_RUSKIN’S RECONSTRUCTION_
The teaching of Ruskin is generally piecemeal and unsystematic, but,
happily, there is one exception to this. In collecting his _Cornhill_
papers for publication as _Unto This Last_ he wrote a Preface
summarizing his practical proposals at their “worst.” They are as
follows:
1. Government Schools, in certain cases compulsory, wherein a child
shall be taught
(_a_) The laws of health, and healthful exercises.
(_b_) Habits of gentleness and justice.
(_c_) The calling by which he is to live.
Compulsory popular education was established ten years after this
demand, and it was long overdue. It was quite central in Mill’s
programme and in that of the school of Cobden and Bright. Only Herbert
Spencer, in obstinate and inflexible individualism, disapproved of State
Schools, and only the Anglican and Catholic Churches, in their own
interest, blocked the way. As to what is taught there, we are slowly
learning Ruskin’s lessons about physical and moral training, and in the
continuation schools and the technical schools are advancing to trade
instruction also; though we are far behind Munich and other German
cities in this regard. More will be found on this on pp. 175-8 in Chap.
VI. The recent orders of the Board of Education distinctly recognize
some difference of subjects for urban, rural and sea-side children.
2. Government workshops for all articles, in fair competition with
private ventures, and turning out nothing that was not genuine and of
good quality.
Broadly speaking, this has not matured. Concerning it we may use
Ruskin’s own words on the whole scheme: “It is only possible to answer
for the final truth of principles, not for the direct success of
plans.”[69] The right attitude, I would suggest, is to develop on
practical lines of utility, and have work done by whatever agency does
it most effectively. This is Ruskin’s drift. It looks as though
municipal milk and beer, municipal houses and coal, as well as heat and
light, municipal theatres and opera, and government transport and
electrical power, were already with us in idea, if not yet in
realization. The method is one for gradual application. Every step will,
very properly, be contested. The experience of the transaction of
business by Government during the Great War has just now strongly
reinforced faith in private enterprise. We should keep an open mind. No
high or final principle comes in, and dogma and prejudice are out of
place.
Hitherto Government has controlled and inspected, rather than itself
carried on the businesses of the country. Very few things are now left
wholly to perfectly free competition. Later on Ruskin gave up Government
workshops in favour of businesses owned and managed by Trade Gilds, thus
anticipating the sequence of public thought in later years. See below in
this Chapter.
3. The unemployed to be taught, or employed at fixed wages, or medically
treated, or coerced to painful labour, according to the need of each
case.
This close pastoral care by public authority has never yet been
realized. It has been left to private philanthropy, guided at one time
by the Elberfeld system as practised in the industrial towns on the
Rhine. As in manufactures the State has guided and inspected business,
rather than conducted it, so its Labour Exchanges and its unemployment
allowance and Insurance against sickness have done much to ease and
diminish the pain of unemployment. But, of course, this is only a stage
in our progress. And the comprehensive lines of Ruskin’s case for the
orphans of Great Business may well be earnestly remembered as a standard
to work towards. We have at any rate left behind us mere reliance on the
terrors of starvation and death as the only spur to industry in the
Great Society, as the present world of vast production and exchange has
been called.[70]
4. Comfort and home for the old and destitute, free from the slur of the
Poor Law.
This has been provided by Old Age Pensions.
Thus Ruskin’s schemes are being or are on the way to be realized, in
quite remarkable detail. How much, uttered by leading writers in 1862,
remains so fresh as these in 1920? Ruskin proclaimed some truths too
early for his peace of mind, but not for the service of men. The
characteristic novelty of the proposals was that they were social, not
political, though written in a period when political reforms occupied
the forefront of progressive thought. They were no doubt a necessary
stage. We should not belittle them in disappointment. For without a
democratic franchise no social reforms could have been achieved.
Ruskin’s proposals are also extremely moderate, and essentially
conservative. He declares his disbelief in “the common Socialist idea of
the division of property,”[71] though, as land is to be in the hands of
those who can use it best, there was to be much compulsory purchase, a
practice with which we are increasingly familiar, for housing, for
allotments, and for small holdings. Nationalization of railways is
definitely part of the programme, as we should expect.[72]
The most radical change concerned Wages. Ruskin declared that wages
should be fixed and steady under the responsibility of either the
Government or the Craft Gilds, and should be independent of the number
of people competing for work. As usual, he blamed the economists because
this was not so in nature, as though physiologists were to blame for
indigestion. But, as mere economics, he understood the doctrine, and
accepted its truth. He says that the cheapening of bread under the
absence of the Corn Laws would cause wages “to fall permanently in
precisely the same proportion.”[73] That is, he accepted the “supply
price” of wages--being the maintenance which the labourer under
competition would accept.
The great issue for human welfare was then, and is now, whether there is
a supply price for wages above the merest starvation line. Labour, so
far, like commodities, has its price determined by the reciprocal action
of the buyers and sellers of it. On the side of demand the buyers cannot
give more than the value of the product of the last labourer they
engage. On the side of supply the labourer would change his trade, or
not have children, or not bring up his children to that trade, or he
would starve and die, unless he received what he considered a
maintenance. This is the supply price. And in any given trade, wages are
fixed at the point where demand and supply are both satisfied. Enough
labourers are employed to make the least valuable worth the required
maintenance and no more. Now the economists, arguing from the phenomena
they saw believed, with Malthus, that there was no decent supply price
for labour in practice, that people would multiply to the very limit of
subsistence. Hence they deduced the terrible doctrine of the Iron Law of
Wages, that wages tend to a starvation level, because they thought first
that food,[74] and afterwards that capital,[75] was fixed at any time,
or increased very slowly. Finally, J. S. Mill taught that fluid capital
or the Wages Fund, that famous centre of controversy, being fixed, the
total capital available for wages had to be divided between an ever
multiplying number of wage earners, some of whom were therefore always
starving.
This treatment of Labour as governed by the same law of supply and
demand as commodities, is the only way it can be treated as subject
matter of a science dealing with the production, distribution and
exchange of wealth. But no one would stop there, shutting his eyes to
the fact that behind the labour stands the labourer, a human being, with
all the spiritual and emotional gifts and needs of a man. Only military
authority treats men so. Even an economist, writing on labour as a
commodity, proceeds to explain how it differs from material
commodities--how slow is its reaction on the side of supply--how high
wages up to a point produce a still higher quality of labour, and so
forth. Business management, also, is a commodity subject to the same
law, but I have never heard that the General Managers of Railway
Companies feel degraded for that reason to the mere level of slaves.
Unluckily the economists, influenced by the poverty that followed the
last great war, which ended in 1815, concluded that the unskilled
labourer would multiply till his children starved. They saw in fact
starvation rampant in England.
This was why Political Economy was called by Carlyle the Dismal Science.
But the economists were no more responsible for it than theologians are
for the Judgment Day, perhaps much less so. Ruskin believed and hated
the doctrine, and so, in fact, was an orthodox Millite. And both he and
Mill had their remedies. Mill recommended education, emigration and
small families. Ruskin appealed to the state or the gilds. In time Mill
came to the same point of view, and died a Socialist. He was able to do
this because he was persuaded by Thornton that the Wages Fund theory did
not hold; that in fact workers produced their own wages, with the help
of some capital to oil the wheels, that is, to fill the gap in time
caused by distribution under the machinery of payment. This occurred in
1869 after _Munera Pulveris_ had been published in _Fraser’s Magazine_
in 1862 and 1863, but before it came out in book form in 1872; and it is
grievous that these two men did not consciously co-operate. Ruskin’s
method of controversy, possibly drove Mill to silence.
The central blast of Ruskin’s attack was against this--ultimately
abandoned--doctrine of hopelessness. I do not mean that we may be quite
cheerful about free competition in wages; for there are departments of
labour so helpless that they cannot obtain a decently living wage.[76]
To meet this, choice of employment is necessary, but cannot always be
found for physically weak or mentally ill-qualified people. The nation
has decided to carry out in specified trades the Ruskinian principle of
the fixed living wage, enforced by the Sweated Industries Acts. Under
these more and more trades may and will come. The economic storm of the
war has broken down the equable course of free competition, and has
caused regulation of wages and prices on all sides. We must not speak as
if this were a normal development either of socialism or of competition.
We have suffered under it as part of the evil of war. The benefits of
competition require time, and a fair field for all forces. There will
still be much done by provision of alternative employment on the land,
by the investment of capital in developing local industries, and
indirectly, by housing, education and temperance reform, to diminish the
remnant of the helpless victims of sweating. Behind these the nation
will probably soon stand, committed to a national minimum in wages and
in hours. Above these government minima stand the various Trades Union
fixed rules. All are Ruskinian,[77] and Mill would rejoice in them too.
A generation ago a national minimum wage had the support of Socialists
of the school of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and of J. A. Hobson.[78] For
a long time it was not orthodox. I remember hearing a Professor of
Political Economy speaking on this subject twice, at an interval of
about ten years. The first time he summed up against it, pointing out
how a minimum tended, in Australian experience, to become a maximum,
with certificates of invalidism or incapacity easily obtainable to
authorize a lower wage. The second time he was for a minimum wage, as
what progressive thinkers hoped for. The steps have, of late, become
rapid. Miners had their wages fixed by the Government after the Coal
Strike of 1912, and again, after the Sankey Commission in 1919. The
Railway and Transport Workers are also under Government protection. An
international Labour Charter is part of the Peace of Versailles, which
must lead to an international minimum. It will be a delicate undertaking
to work it out with any completeness. Within a nation the cost of living
varies from place to place; the value of money rises and falls as
general prices fall or rise. Internationally, between San Francisco, New
York, London, Constantinople, and Yokohama, the differences forbid
uniformity of wage. Nobody can compel an employer to employ anybody
whose work results in no profit. Some people exist who are not worth a
minimum wage, unless it is too low to be acceptable. There will have to
be provision for these. Pensions for Old Age and invalidity will assume
larger proportions. The race will have to worry out this complex tangle
of man with his environment. What is clear is that we have reached the
Ruskinian standpoint about it.
_Fors Clavigera_ is the most remarkable of the writings of Ruskin. He
who has read _Fors_, or a large part of it, knows Ruskin, and if he
loves and reveres the author, has become a Ruskinian. But without
reading _Fors_ no man or woman can become a Ruskinian. In it you become
intimate with the man. He talks to you like a friend, button-holes you
very much as Socrates did, invites you to laugh with him, and join in
laughs at himself, tells you all his troubles, and the causes of the ups
and downs of his spirits, tells you of his loneliness and his hopes and
intentions, shows you his accounts every month, tells you where he has
lost money, and to whom he has given it away, lets you see his letters
and his replies to them, and holds you, by the personal power of him,
while he pours vials of prophetic denunciation upon Society only to be
equalled in the pages of the Hebrew Prophets; and then clinches it all
with “Mind you, I mean every word of it; no exaggeration here.”
_Fors_ is a book--a message:--it is often playful in style, the matter
all scattered. The subject changes from page to page; nothing in it can
be referred to without that Queen of Indexes which accompanies it: but
the unity of its subject is in the unity of the author. You carry on an
idea, cropping up under all sorts of irrelevancies and chance
illustrations--and you carry on certain jokes too, or humorous
allusions, as we all do in common life. This miscellany, I am persuaded,
will attract readers longer than the stately symmetry of _Modern
Painters_, or the laborious detail of the _Stones of Venice_. Who but
Ruskin could have brought thus out of his treasury things new and old?
We shall look in vain for a completely worked out system of business and
legislation in Ruskin’s writings. His Utopia is delightfully worked up
here and there in detail, but it has great gaps; it often seems to raise
more difficulties than it settles; and it is not always consistent with
itself.
Indeed, one could not expect completeness or real mastery of the
problem, either from the man or from the nature of the subject. From the
man, because the prophet and the practical administrator are rarely
combined. Comte went into detail, and we do not much value the
Positivist detail. The prophet is the man with the clear vision and hot
heart. The practical administrator must sit on committees and keep
secretaries, and meet deputations; he must check accounts and hold
dinner parties. What we desire is that practical men should give ear to
the prophet.
Secondly, the subject is too vast and complicated for complete
treatment. Great as has been the volume and secure the conviction of the
attacks on our present social system, how very little in the way of
stable fabric exists to-day in confessed substitution for it. Socialist
and Communist colonies have failed through their principles being in
advance of the practice of the men who had to pioneer their course. Of
the thirty or forty whose history has been collected, most have broken
up, a few with profit to the members, but most with loss. Religious
communities have, of course, shown the greatest tenacity. The Shakers
are now diminishing and discouraged, though they own some of the richest
land in America, and are commercially connected with a valuable property
besides, known as Mother Siegel’s Syrup. The Doukhobors from Russia now
settled in the far West of Canada, have saved themselves by their
communism under persecution. They again are bound by a mighty religious
bond. But many are being absorbed by the society around, and their
primitive faith in their leader Peter Verigin as an incarnation of God,
will hardly survive Canadian education. We will not, then, expect to see
a complete reconstruction of society. Ruskin’s is most fully worked out
in _Time and Tide_: but _Fors_ is thickly scattered with it too.