Industry,” was the forerunner of the Whitley Councils, but is on more
thoroughgoing guild lines. Mr. Malcolm Sparkes, a young director of a
carpentry and cabinet-making business in Willesden, was mixed up as an
employer in a disastrous building strike in 1914. Hopeless of any
solution by hostile and suspicious bodies of organized masters and
organized men, never meeting except as opponents, and working by warfare
and the balance of power, he conceived the idea of combined councils,
representing both sides, meeting periodically to consider the well-being
of the industry. Such bodies were not to deal with disputes, but could
often avoid them and remove their causes. Above all they would provide a
friendly atmosphere. He persuaded the men’s organizations first, and
induced them to approach the masters, who responded willingly; and after
due debates, and two years’ permeation of opinion in all the bodies
concerned, the Builders’ Parliament was constituted. At its sixth
quarterly meeting in August, 1919, it passed by an overwhelming majority
a report, called the Foster Report, under which masters would become
paid officials and capitalists would receive a fixed interest. Mr.
Sparkes and the builders, therefore, are using their united organization
to prepare the way for the Guild arrangement, and are favourable to it.
They have offered the labour to build some thousands of houses to the
Corporation of Manchester, if the latter will supply the capital and
take the business risk. But the Whitley Council movement has had a wider
development, if a less advanced one.
Mr. J. H. Whitley, Chairman of Committees in the House of Commons, and
Chairman of a Government Sub-Committee on the relations of employers and
employed, read an article by Mr. Sparkes on his scheme in the _Venturer_
for December, 1916, and asked him to prepare a memorandum for him in
detail, and to record his progress to date. This memorandum became the
basis of the Whitley Report. The Government adopted it and organized
under it the Whitley Councils. The day after Mr. Sparkes’s memorandum
reached the printers the author was sent to prison as a conscientious
objector to military service. He was a Quaker; he had refused an
exemption as a works manager in a controlled business; he had resigned
his directorship rather than do war work; and now in defiance of an Act
of Parliament which granted exemption, the blind hand of the Tribunals
and the War Office could do nothing better with this young patriot than
to keep him in gaol for two years. He was liberated a little before the
others because the King happened to ask for the author of the Whitley
Report. This kind of thing gives pause to one’s hopes of better times
coming out of the action of the present militarist states. To all these
proposals Ruskin ought to be recognized as the idealist forerunner. His
guilds of craftsmen, though differently founded, are very much like Mr.
Cole’s. The same social message which Oxford sent through Ruskin from
Christ Church and Corpus, she now sends through a Fellow of Magdalen. As
the consummation of the idealist approaches, it becomes necessary to
work the ideas out, and people will listen to the details, indeed will
fiercely question them, and demand something practical. But in the
history of economic thought, should these ideas become ultimately
fruitful, a greater place should be found for the author of _Fors_ than
has yet been awarded to him by our writers on Economics. The chief
differences between the modern scheme and that of forty years ago is
that Ruskin would confiscate nothing, and would not demand, would even
object to, a labour monopoly in the hands of the Guilds, which Mr. Cole
declares to be a necessity, without which a Guild is not a Guild. It
will be for our successors fifty years hence to say on which side wisdom
lay.
On one point the age has gone beyond Ruskin. For good or evil we know we
have nothing to trust to but Democracy. From the ugliness and
gullibility of the democracy the secluded artist shrank, living in
beauty and luxury at Oxford or Venice or by the Lake of Coniston. There
was excuse, and there is still much excuse, for men of little faith. The
democracy can be played upon and excited to war: its ruling puppets dare
not take the drink from it even in war time. It has “demanded,” as
economists say, our conscienceless and sensational newspapers, and it
loves to read them. It needs much education, and particularly it needs
what Ruskin hoped for from Education--character and conduct; first,
grace and health and beauty of life; and, as chief intellectual prize,
a relentless love of truth. Would that everybody would refuse to buy
again a paper that had once deceived them, or to vote for a politician
once proved untrustworthy.
Reformers, forgetting the dead weight they have to shift, turn their
guns on one another. Socialists seem to be most scornful of Liberalism,
and particularly of those employers who are generous and
public-spirited.
It must be emphasized that Ruskin was an aristocrat in temperament. In
fact he repudiated the idea of an equality which did not, he declared,
exist. His sections in _Munera Pulveris_ against equal voting and on
“natural slavery"--I suppose learnt from Aristotle’s _Politics_--are
clear on this.[85] He did not support negro slavery, but his interests
were chiefly taken up with opposing economic slavery at home, or
reserving it for the fit people. The whole passage must be read to be
understood.
It is now in 1920 nearly fifty years since _Fors Clavigera_ began to
come out, and the outlines of St. George’s Guild were drawn. Those who
in that decade found a new inspiration and delight in discipleship to
him, are now growing elderly; the glory of the early time when Ruskin’s
genius was irradiating the pages of _Fors_ with the hope of a kingdom of
God to be raised within the kingdom of this world, was in the days of
youth, in the spring of aspiration and a not easily bounded hope. We
nourished our hearts on godlike food; and we owe our Master an
inextinguishable debt. It is often doubtless a thought full of sadness
that the tender grace of a day that is dead will never come back to us,
in the sober light of long experience in the realm of the commonplace.
Our task now is, to gather up in our maturity that which abides; for our
days are passing, and though the growth of the kingdom has not been all
that we might have hoped, its spirit must still be handed on, and fixed,
so far as we can fix it, in the permanent habits of man.
We Ruskinians are often called sentimental. But it is not sentimental to
keep sentiment in its proper place and to have a sane and well directed
emotion at our beck when something has to be done. “Sentiment” means
ill-directed emotion which slops over. Loyalty is not inconsistent with
criticism. It is essential that that which is merely temporary or
fanciful in the instructions which run through the pages of _Fors_
should not be insisted upon for ever. Those pages contain many quaint
directions untested by experience.
The Guild of St. George was intended to be a company of people who would
bind themselves to live in a healthy way, doing harm to no man and no
landscape, cultivating land by hand or water power, and contributing to
the public and educational work of the Guild, at first, one-tenth of
their income; but as this was too much for most people, the amount was
left elastic.[86]
The Creed of St. George is a noble document. It had to be signed by
every member of the Guild.[87]
1. I trust in the Living God, Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and
earth, and of all things and creatures, visible and invisible.
I trust in the kindness of His Law and the goodness of His work.
2. I trust in the nobleness of human nature, in the majesty of its
faculties, the fulness of its mercy, and the joy of its love.
I will strive to love my neighbour as myself, and even when I cannot,
will act as if I did.
3. I will labour, with such strength and opportunity as God gives me,
for my own daily bread: and all that my hand finds to do, I will do with
my might.
4. I will not deceive, nor cause to be deceived, any human being for my
gain or pleasure; nor hurt, nor cause to be hurt, any human being for my
gain or pleasure: nor rob, nor cause to be robbed, any human being for
my gain or pleasure.
5. I will not kill or hurt any living creature needlessly, nor destroy
any beautiful thing, but will strive to save and comfort all gentle
life, and guard and perfect all natural beauty upon the earth.
6. I will strive to raise my own body and soul daily into higher powers
of duty and happiness; not in rivalship or contention with others, but
for the help, delight and honour of others, and for the joy and peace of
my own life.
7. (On loyalty to the laws.)
8. (On loyalty to the Guild.)
As an organization this little realm within the realm came to very
little. It needed advertisement, propagandism, somebody to preach it,
and to organize it. The prophet at Brantwood wrote about it to the then
very limited audience of _Fors_, and there propaganda ended. There were
about forty-two Companions of St. George altogether at one time; and the
Master was autocratic and irregular through ill health. Some land at
Abbeydale, Sheffield, was taken, and a settlement of Socialists
attempted without success. George Baker presented a woodland tract of
fifteen acres at Bewdley; Mrs. Talbot some cliff-like land and cottages
at Barmouth; and a small holding on the Yorkshire coast at Claughton,
near Whitby, was acquired. The land cultivation came to very little.
The land at Abbeydale is now a successful market garden with a
residence, let to a tenant in the usual way. A house has been built
within recent years on the land at Bewdley, and part, if not all, of it
is at last in cultivation by a Liverpool couple tired of town life. Mrs.
Talbot’s representative manages the cottages at Barmouth on the lines of
an ordinary good landlord. We have sold the bit of Yorkshire moorland,
long troublesome. After delays and legal difficulties, George Baker, a
Quaker alderman of Birmingham, who had been co-trustee of the
properties, and had borne much of the business burden of it from the
beginning, was made Master, and a few new members were enrolled by
invitation. The Guild has held of late years a number of annual
meetings, at Oxford, Coniston, Sheffield, Bewdley, London, Manchester,
Liverpool and Birmingham, which were delightful social occasions, and
which transacted the business of the properties, and made grants from
the income, which, apart from subscriptions, is between one and two
hundred pounds a year, mostly representing Ruskin’s own gifts. The
grants go as a rule to literary, agricultural or other purposes on the
Master’s lines. On the death of Mr. Baker the Mastership was accepted by
Mr. George Thomson, of Huddersfield, the forerunner, under Ruskin’s
guidance, of the profit-sharing movement in this country. He resigned,
through failing health, in 1920, and Mr. H. E. Luxmoor, of Eton, was
appointed. Mr. William Wardle, of 4 Olive Lane, Wavertree, Liverpool, is
the Hon. Sec. Two members represent the Guild on the Committee of the
Sheffield Corporation which has charge of the Ruskin Museum in
Meersbrook Park. This Museum is the property of the Guild on permanent
loan to the Corporation of Sheffield who maintain it. It is indeed among
the Guild properties the one really valuable concrete survival of the
labour and enthusiasm of the founder. It is one of the very lovely
things of the whole world, with its concentrated charm and delicate
fineness.
These details about the present day of small things, about this remnant
of an ancient hope, are not themselves important, but may not be without
interest to some of the many thousand readers of _Fors Clavigera_. Those
letters are full more of promise and of postponement than of achievement
or permanently established method; and the rather wilful and fantastic
adventures of a mind that was seldom at rest, often overflow into the
monthly budget without as much repression as a sober systematizer would
have exercised, but with endless delight.
In the early hopeful days, when there floated before Ruskin’s
imagination the conception of an influential and numerous body of
Companions of the Guild, comprising the moral and intellectual
aristocracy of the country, he laid his plans on large lines. In the
Master’s Report for 1881 he wrote that he expected “the Guild to extend
its operations over the Continent of Europe and number its members
ultimately by myriads”; which in the mouth of a Greek scholar means
accurately by tens of thousands. He instructed the Companions to read no
newspapers until he should be able to found a newspaper fit for them to
read, an instruction which his most devout follower has never obeyed.
Moreover there was to be an authorized list of books which alone might
be read, of which _Bibliotheca Pastorum_ was the first part. This is
perhaps the most erratic of all the proposals which crossed his mind.
He also criticized the coinage of the country, and insisted that there
should be under the rule of St. George sovereigns called ducats, of pure
gold, a metal which is of itself quite unsuited for use as coinage, and
needs to be hardened by alloy before it is fit for the purposes of the
mint. Then the shilling was to be called a florin and was to be divided
into ten pence. This copying of the coins of Florence in the middle
ages, which as Ruskin once said to me, gave her merchants credit in the
time of Edward I, cannot be considered seriously; indeed, these fanciful
commands can only be matter for regret. There can be but one coinage in
a country, even if the Guild of St. George had become a large
institution. So late as 1884 Mr. Ruskin told a party of us at Brantwood
that the St. George’s Company was going to issue coins of pure gold.
Rents, payable of course to the State, were to be one-tenth of the
produce. Now rents cannot with any justice be settled that way. The
farmer who farms poor land should be as well off and get as good a
return for his labour as he who farms rich land. Under ordinary
competition things turn out that way. All farmers in theory, and
approximately in practice, receive the same return for labour and
capital applied to land, and the margin goes to the landlord as rent.
Ruskin’s system is known as the metayer system, only that half, not
one-tenth of, the profits usually go to the landlord. It is an
old-fashioned, primitive, and uneconomic system, and is used in Italy,
Portugal, on the Danube, in Russia, and over about one-seventh of
France. At the time of the French Revolution, Arthur Young found
seven-eighths of France managed in this way. It is suited for small
holdings; but it discourages intensive culture, for it would be no use
for a metayer tenant to spend £1 in increasing his product by £2, if
half of the £2 went to the landlord. Ruskin liked it because it made a
friendly co-operation between landlord and tenant. There was never any
clash of interests, and the tenant was never under real hardship. It is
morally a much more attractive plan. It bars any keen competition
between tenants and it leads to permanency of tenure.
Throughout Ruskin’s proposals for reform we shall nearly always find in
each something fanciful and dainty, but impracticable--a sort of pretty
decoration tacked on in gaiety of heart, in the spirit of Gothic
ornamentation. But if we knock off his little pinnacles, and deny
ourselves the glow of his stained glass windows, we shall generally find
a commodious and serviceable erection of constructive reform left. In
fact, he turns out to have been on the main stream of progress, though
pleading all the time that he was harking back to a happier past. His
agricultural and business proposals contained fruitful elements,
appearing ahead of their time; events from many sides have proved how
illuminating his suggestions were.
Ruskin, as we have noted, would limit all incomes at the top by slicing
off the superfluity and giving a title instead. In occult ways,
unfortunately, peerages and baronetcies and knighthoods do come about by
the sacrifice of cash; and in more open and creditable form the
graduated income tax, the super-tax, and the steeply rising death
duties are partial measures in the same direction.
There is perhaps nothing more fanciful in Ruskin’s reconstruction of
Society than his marriage regulations, laid down in _Time and Tide_, and
mentioned in the last chapter. We have not yet put Cupid into harness to
this extent, but the popular interest and concern about the propagation
of the unfit and the feeble-minded, and in general the attention which
is being paid to heredity and the interest in eugenics, are all in the
direction laid down by Ruskin in a thorough-going shape, fearless as the
schemes of childhood. By feeding school children and by doctoring them
the State supplements the weakness of the homes. In many unfamiliar
forms the work of St. George goes on.
But in his day thought and practice in Social Reform were comparatively
uninstructed by experience. One is reminded of his own phrase about
Cimabue and Giotto. They uttered “the burning messages of prophecy by
the stammering lips of infants.” He goes straight for his object without
fear or hesitation, as an inexperienced child will toddle across a
crowded street, unfearing because unknowing about the motor cars.
Ruskin, for instance, would set the unemployed to reclaim waste lands.
To which of us has not that thought come? Here are the men wanting work;
here is the land wanting workers. Let us put them together. But
experience has shown that the dour nature of the unoccupied land, and
the frequently dour nature of the unoccupied men, render such schemes
generally hopeless, and at times even scandalous, failures. Land and men
are unoccupied because they are hard to occupy, and by putting together
waste land and waste men you only double the difficulty of the task.
When good workers might make something of bad land, or bad workers of
good land, bad workers on bad land are hopeless. Some years ago in the
House of Commons in the debate on the Right to Work Bill, Mr. Burns
explained amid general agreement the complete failure of relief works,
and their tendency rather to increase the evil and waste public
resources. Why is the land out of cultivation? For no other reason than
that it does not pay to cultivate it. The return will not give a
maintenance and pay taxes. We may leave rent out, for landlords would
rather have their lands cultivated for no rent than let them lie a waste
of weeds. And why are the men not at work? Because in normal times
about 40 per cent. of them are unemployable, the degenerates who are
such a cause for alarm and concern to the nation. Of the rest, most are
unsuited to agricultural work, and only a moderate proportion can be
helped in that way. That some tolerable land can be so cultivated, and
some industrious unemployed so maintained is true, but it requires the
spiritual amalgam of the Salvation Army, or some such body of patient
and capable enthusiasts, to solve the difficult problem, for a selected
minority of the submerged, on their farm colonies. They are doing the
work of St. George.
Above these stricken ones comes the ordinary farm labourer, who is
unfortunately migrating to the towns. Him Mr. Ruskin hoped to settle on
land. Such a scheme of small holdings, if backed by sufficient capital,
worked by experts, and favourably situated for a market, might even in
the seventies have succeeded. Of course it would not have had about it
all the moral excellences, the grace of character and the charm of
nature and art, which delight us so in the St. George’s lands of the
future which we read about in _Fors_. However, Ruskin never concentrated
upon it, but spent most of his time and of the resources of the Guild
on the Sheffield Museum instead. He did what he found he could do the
best. He knew he was leaving great gaps for others to fill up. He says,
touchingly, in the Preface to _Love’s Meinie_ in 1881: “It has been,
throughout, my trust that if Death should write on these plans of mine
‘What this man began to build he was not able to finish,’ God may also
write on them, not in anger, but in aid, ‘A stronger than he cometh.’”
But with labour and patience and against strong hostile political
forces, the Small Holdings Act has been for some years at work. The
obstruction of the squires still renders it useless in many counties,
and there can be no more true task for St. George than to support
agencies such as the Small Holdings Association. By its means, as a
matter of fact, the peasantry is being restored to the land on a proper
business basis. Tasks of this magnitude require organization on a large
scale, and the payment of proper returns. No social benefit is given by
letting some individual hold land at less than its value. The County
Councils since the war are engaged upon it. We are now again on the eve
of a large settlement of returned soldiers on the land, and of an
attempt to brighten the villages.
St. George, again, ordered that the homes of workpeople should be
cheerful, that they should have gardens and flowers and sunshine, that
the long miserable rows of uniform cottages should be of the past. These
things, largely under the inspiration of Ruskin, are being done, in
First Garden City at Letchworth, and in such model villages as
Bournville, New Earswick, Port Sunlight, the Hampstead suburb, and
similar suburbs at Manchester and Hull. But it is all on far too small a
scale. The true task of St. George to-day is to strengthen these
progressive movements. The growth of the towns since 1871 has made this
urban problem the most urgent of all. How many rows of dreadful box
homes have been built. The country is being choked by the spreading
towns. Purely agricultural colonies are good, but towns cannot be
founded without the help of the manufacturers who make a town.
Again, the intention of St. George was to have a happy body of
workpeople, loyally co-operating with a superior type of employer, and
banishing greedy competition. The surviving remnant of the Guild of St.
George has very little in its own power in this way, but amongst the
employers who have built these model villages there exists just this
kind of relation in manifold ways. And again, it pays. When in the
British Association at York the firm of Rowntree and Co. was being
commended for the benefits they are giving their workpeople, Mr. Seebohm
Rowntree, whose whole heart is in the work, made a speech insisting that
it paid them. He did this in order to induce other people to do the
same, and to show that it was feasible for the ordinary manufacturer.
Broadly speaking, we may say that what we are all striving for is being
done, in ways more wholesale and more complicated than could have been
worked out in the seventies. Two generations of social pioneers,
thinkers, and experimenters, have been grappling with the problems since
then, so that we should not expect precisely the same prescription to be
given by the social physician to-day as was given by one of the great
pioneers of healing nearly fifty years ago.
The agricultural settlement seems the furthest from practical politics.
Nevertheless, a series of enactments since 1881 have established in
Ireland that very arrangement of a peasant proprietary paying a fixed
rent to the State, which is the essence of Ruskin’s proposal; except
that the Irish rents under the Land Purchase Acts are terminable after a
period of years; and so rather more easy than Ruskin’s. Presumably, if
found successful, the system could be extended. It will certainly occupy
the minds of reformers very much during the immediately coming years.